Michael, Isn't Bob Perelman your brother? I wanted to check the status of
the coined word "unaugural" as of Dec. 13, 2000 and did an Alta Vista and
Google search (6 and 26 hits respectively). Most of the entries appear to be
typos but one of them referred to an essay by Bob Perelman that briefly
discusses The Unaugural Poem, a parody of Maya Angelou's Inaugural Poem read
at Clinton's first inauguration. I've pasted the excerpt below. Here's my
proposition: Do an Alta Vista and Google search on unaugural on Feb. 13,
2001 and on Dec. 13 2001 to gauge the spread of the term.
Uncanny.
excerpt from BUILDING A MORE POWERFUL VOCABULARY: BRUCE ANDREWS AND THE
WORLD (TRADE CENTER)
http://www.english.upenn.edu/~perelman/ANDREWS.txt
>Coolidge and Fagin wrote a parody of Angelou's
>inaugural poem that uses an OuLiPo method of
>defamilization. Every noun Angelou used was replaced by
>a noun five words removed in the dictionary. Thus the
>passage I quoted earlier becomes:
>
>There is a true yawn to respond to
>The singing Roach and the wise Rock Crystal.
>So say the Ash Can, the Hippogriff, the Jetsam,
>The Afterbirth, the Native American Legion, the Sinner,
>The Catnip, the Musskellunge, the Freezer, the Great
>White Way,
>The Ipso Facto, the Quota, the Prima Donna, the Sheet,
>The Gavel, the Stovepipe, the Prawn,
>The Prism, the Homburg, the Taxi.
>They hear. They all hear
>The spatter of the Tree of Heaven.
>
>
>If Andrews is playing with fire in a decentered,
>all-over fashion, Coolidge and Fagin are, with these
>substitutions, picking up specific burning brands one
>after the other. Some of the changes are particularly
>charged: Asian = Ash Can; Native American = Native
>American Legion; Rabbi = Quota, etc. To any identifying
>reader these substitutions might feel like insulting
>jokes. But if one tried to ascribe a particular location
>to the source of the insult, it wouldn't be easy. This
>isn't Andrew Dice Clay joking about faggots, or a racist
>attack. It is the dictionary's random speech. If we allow
>ourselves the double vision that the parody assumes, the
>oddness of the results can be funny. The alphabetic
>proximity of "Catholic" to "Catnip" or of "Gay" to
>"Gavel" furnishes a compact display of the arbitrariness
>of language. And then there's a second level, on which
>the arbitrary suddenly becomes paradoxically meaningful.
>Being gay will mean, for the next few decades, dealing
>with courtrooms and gavels directly or indirectly;
>"stovepipe" is a surprisingly good nickname for
>"straight," both geometrically and with its New England
>crackerbarrel connotations.
>
>But we shouldn't lose sight of the basic fuel of
>the parody, which is a great dissatisfaction with the
>coalition of identities that Angelou is positing, and the
>emphatic rejection of its rhetoric that works with
>established cadences and symbols, not single words. I
>imagine that it was the specific inclusiveness of
>Angelou's poem, plus its being officially recognized as
>poetry by an incoming administration, that triggered the
>desire to pull the rug from under it. I doubt that it
>would have seemed like a particularly good idea to redo,
>say, Amiri Baraka's "It's Nation Time." But for all of
>its vocabularistic satire on names and specific
>identities, the subject position from which "The
>Unaugural Poem" is funny is itself specific: it is one
>where all resources of language are present and equally
>available: the writer must be able to take possession of
>all the words in the dictionary without any moments of
>alienation. There is one restriction involved, however:
>all particular identification has to be eliminated. Any
>investment in present tense collectivities--or to put it
>another way, any present tense political identity--is
>banished. To parody Angelou is to reject a unification of
>poetry and politics of a far different kind than Andrews
>calls for. But if political poetry is defined as having
>an effect beyond the purely literary sphere, then
>Angelou's unificiation has a much stronger grip on the
>title than Andrews' aggressiveness. Rock, river, and tree
>used as large symbols may grate on a spectrum of poetic
>sensibilities, but as political speech their vacuousness
>can be seen is strategic and as forming vehicles for more
>specific messages. She used her momentary political
>capital to recite a rhythmic call for a multicultural
>coalition with anti-militarist overtones. How much
>efficacy we want to grant these overtones is a question.
Tom Walker
Sandwichman and Deconsultant
Bowen Island, BC
