Best Loved Poems in the English Language Dept.

Vow to Poetry
by Gary Sullivan


I won’t self-medicate today
no
I’ll have a hot dog
then go off to a cave in the Himalayas!

Sweep it on over
sweep it on over
move over cold dog
cuz the hot dog’s movin’ in!

—Oct. 24, 2002

Chris and Gary have been discussing my admiration for Gary’s poem “Vow to Poetry” (see above). I wish I could deliver a whole paper on this poem, but I can only spare a few minutes, so there is one thing I want to get out of the way before anything else: the heading “Best Loved Poems in the English Language Dept.” was meant ironically in that it plays on the “piety,” as Gary puts it, of the entire notion of a select national canon of the sort that would most likely exclude such a poem in real life (the only conscious sense of “Dept.” I had in mind was the second sense that Gary mentions, i.e., in the “Famous Connecticut Milkmen Dept.” sense, but the other sense, the "English Department” sense, does work nicely); it is not at all ironic, however, in that I really do mean it: it is certainly of the best loved poems by me. It makes me deliriously happy.

So, anyway, yes, I love this poem. I think it’s good. Not bad, good. Yes, it uses a certain notion of badness as a starting point—what Gary calls a healthy “disrespect” for the pieties of poetry—but in my opinion, the result is pure, positive, fresh-faced beauty.

Ron Padgett, whom Gary mentioned, was the first poet I thought of when reading this poem, though I can’t remember how “Voice” goes. Gary’s poem has the same understated exuberance that Padgett has at his best (and Padgett is at his best more often than not).

How do I love this poem? Let me count the ways.

I love the first line:

I will not self-medicate today

Haw! What hilarious, sad, valiant, doomed determination! Arguably, the poem could end here and be complete: this is the vow to poetry, self-contained and self-explanatory. Adding to the humor is the sense that there has been a category mistake of some sort, that we have accidentally swerved into not a vow to poetry, but a vow to sobriety or chemical independence (which could of course very well be the source of the phrase in its original context before it was sucked out of the web by Google).

I love the second line:

no

No capitalization, no punctuation, no hands, ma! There’s so much bravado in these two letters. An entire world of clean and sober possibilities suddenly, dramatically, opened to the speaker!

I love the third line:

I’ll have a hot dog

Set off by itself, this line too betrays its pre-Google origins: someone is simply ordering lunch. Part of the pleasure of reading this involves the faint recognition that its continuity with the preceding line, and the one that follows, is illusory. And then there’s the obvious delightfulness of the notion that something as simple as having a hot dog could be a viable alternative to self-medication.

I love the fourth line:

then go off to a cave in the Himalayas!

Yee-HAW! Wildly, unpredictably, we have veered from the setting of reasonable albeit slightly banal goals (having a hot dog) to a manic omnipotence. The exclamation point is just right (one of the most Padgett-like touches). We might add that the introduction of the “cave” directly following the “hot dog” gives rise to all sorts of Freudian associations, thus increasing the hilarity.

I love the second stanza:

Sweep it on over
sweep it on over
move over cold dog
cuz the hot dog’s movin’ in!

This is from Hank Williams Sr.’s “Move It on Over.” It’s just a chorus of the song, lifted directly without editing or apologies. It’s great, because the cold dog that’s moving over really would be cold, having been in that Himalayan cave and all. And “sweep”: I don’t know why that’s so perfect, but it is.

The poem’s structural integrity is impeccable: whereas the four lines of the first stanza, as I’ve said, depend on a principle of collage for their continuity (having been taken from different sources), the second stanza is itself an intact block of verse, but its four lines continue the initial process of collage in adjoining themselves to the first stanza. The whole piece, then, consists of two overlapping phases of assemblage: the first, in which four lines are combined to construct a single discursive unit, and the second, in which two stanzas (one “assembled,” one whose organic status precedes composition) are similarly combined to form yet another continuous sequence. Fearful symmetry!