Poppin’ Johnny: a new American myth
The Poetry of George Wallace

Lenny DellaRocca

George Wallace has written the quintessential American book of poetry. The poems in his new book Poppin’ Johnny New American Poems lift off the pages like so many warm-colored hot air balloons in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. And while they glide over the American checkerboard of fields and farms, these poems also hover over the urban streets of American cities where they take in the smells of restaurants brimming with working people as the sun rises, the rough textures of alleys at night and the blue-denimed boys who ride subways, and others who fling fish guts for a living.

Wallace is quite aware that he borrows the imagery and sonic atmospheres of Carl Sandburg, Jack Kerouac, and Walt Whitman. But these inspired sketches stand fully on their own.

The working class hero is Poppin Johnny whom we do not actually meet – at least not in name - until the last poem. Wallace portrays Johnny in A MAN ON SKATES this way – "…he was an ordinary guy a guy in a shirt from nine to five."

Wallace often uses the list poem to set Johnny down in the middle of his world.

The caution one needs to take in writing a list poem is that it can get too long, it’s easy to run with a list of lines, and the poem can lose its power. The poet needs the skill to sustain that magic by making the list invisible to the reader so that what sparkles in the mind is the purity of the total package. Wallace makes that look easy.

The poems that put Johnny on his sometimes quiet and sometimes haughty path to his destiny, which is really what this book is about, are composed of lines that run into each other, often without punctuation, forcing the reader to slow down, making the impact immediate but not before simmering or blooming into the world. It is easy to write without punctuation and make it look like one knows what one’s doing, but there aren’t many who can and control the pace, forward the narrative and dress the setting making the character’s world real not only to the character himself, but to the reader.

Such is the craft of the poet. Such is the genius of Wallace.

The America Poppin’ Johnny wanders through has changed since Neal Cassidy and company drove from coast to coast in the 1950s, but not so much as one might think. There is still baseball, Chevys, the Fourth of July, tools men use with their hands, Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam, Roy Rogers, Gene Kelly and James Dean. To be sure, Wallace sprinkles American celebrity throughout Poppin’ Johnny’s landscape giving this America a foundation set in the collective consciousness of readers of a certain age. It is steeped with all that many associate with that simpler way of life gone forever, but remains home base in the heart. In this sense, Wallace has tapped into that yearning for the house in the suburbs and the white, picket fence. What could perhaps be a chauvinistic vibe brimming in THAT GIRL’S A CHEVROLET, perpetuates the 1950s ideal of woman as sex object – "what are you waiting for boy! take her for a ride!" That was the 1950s, of course.

Johnny does not ever seem to find happiness, and Wallace expresses this in a most simple way, in a way that speaks volumes about Americans – "he wants to drink at that table not this one." (LIFE GOES FLAT DEAD IN SUMMER). Hopelessness comes across beautifully, and so poignantly it hurts- (also from the same poem) "a gold cigarette case in one hand and his forehead in the other"

Loneliness and hopelessness have always been motivation for travel, people have always tried looking for the better life in another town or country. In THE NEXT BIG TRAIN GOING EAST the narrator talks to a man in a train station and asks him where he’s been, and he’s been everywhere: Bombay, Singapore, Hong Hong, Panama, Sidney. He "sat at the feet of a guru in the Himalaya foothills" and "knew how to handle himself in a barroom brawl... " He asks the man "where he was headed and he said cleveland." When this world traveler asks his inquisitor where he’s from, he says, "just up the road – but I’m headed to any of those places you’ve been to"

One would think that the calloused soul of Poppin Johnny would make him bitter, but there is no bitterness anywhere, there is however, a soft side. After all, Johnny is a hero, someone we all want to be, someone who gets up after he’s knocked down, someone who loves even though that love is unrequited. Love is always out of reach, or when it arrives, it doesn’t stay long. In BEFORE EVERYTHING IS OVER, Wallace shows us that Johnny can be tender, he confides that he wants to make love to "you with your empty hands You with the sunlight that leaks out of your darkness and into my world" Johnny sometimes allows himself to be vulnerable, he let’s go in "your perfumed silence"

To be fair, not all of the poems in Poppin Johnny are brilliant, but what volume is one hundred percent brilliant in all aspects? My least favorite poem is YOU WERE A RIVER TO ME ONCE BECAUSE YOU REALLY ARE A RIVER. The opening stanza falls flat, it begins, "i loved you once like a fisherman on the edge of a river – not a very profound simile. And, "like a whaler in his scrimshaw dreams of hearts and flowers" – the association of scrimshaw with the hearts and flowers seems a bit mundane. There is nothing there that awakens the senses like so many lines in all of the other poems in the book. Lines such as "like a ship’s mate who catches first sight of land" is benign and simply has no power or magic. I know nothing about being a seaman, maybe that’s why I don’t feel this first stanza, or maybe it’s just a fact that in a volume of poetry there are just some pieces far more brilliant than others; that just don’t meet the standard set by the poet. The rest of RIVER continues with a list of weak similes, which is the only time Wallace exposes this as a list poem. The poem ends with "i did not know what a river could do but then i found out." This is the only bad poem in the book.

As weak as RIVER is, the following poem I SAW THROUGH THE WINDOW OF A CROSS-TOWN BUS explodes. Here Wallace is at his best, plying his beat sensibility with a sepia-toned brush putting the reader on a bus and "in a one room hovel in eastern fucking europe listening to other eastern fucking europeans argue over a fucking chicken…"

The poem is as fresh and provocatively sparkling as Manhattan skyscrapers on a clear, spring day. The narrator, trapped on a bus in New York City has had it with "crunching numbers" and his "shitty apartment in Brooklyn" – his "bad shoes" and "American coffee." Here Poppin’ Johnny is the everyman New Yorker yearning for nature amid the "steam pipes streetlights and manhole covers." His world is void of frogs, ponds or fish spawn to distract from the "ashes and paychecks full of empty lies" – but in a dramatic escape from the concrete landscape, the beaten back Johnny sees "you, through the window of a bus on the eighth street crosstown line, stopping to examine a shop display on Christopher street. The contrast between his world and hers is stark. He is tired, she is vibrant, he is going nowhere on a bus, she is in the middle of the city on her way to what could be Heaven in Johnny’s eyes.

Wallace moves the reader through the poem image by image while at the same time keeping you pinned to the central theme: Poppin’ Johnny has been there, done that more times than he can remember. His hands are rough and his language rougher as he speaks through a string of images and musical narratives throughout the book. In I WALKED DOWNTOWN TO THE DOCKS AT DAWN, we are set in what obviously is San Francisco: a fish market where "men who have been up for hours hauling in nets and fixing crab pots and loading and unloading crates of…mackerel flounder seabass and fluke…" Johnny is represented by the "men who unwrap sticks of chewing gum and shove it in their tombstone mouths…" We are strung along with these guys who "play dice at the bar…where "there are a couple of odd women" whose "hands are big as a pair of lobster claws…" then the next image brings us to a brown bear "fishing in a cold stream…" an then we’re brought back to the men who "hose down fish scales blood guts and bones…." The poem ends up at the end of the day when the men are off shift and "…drown out the sound of morning traffic with cold beer and music and pickled eggs."

Wallace uses the entire repertoire of the mature poet in his poems. His stunning images encased in immaculate rhythms satisfy completely. Paying attention to the use of commas as opposed to using the word "and" at opportune moments is an unseen skill by only those poets who have long mastered their art: "cold beer and music and pickled eggs" is more alive and musical than cold beer, music and pickled eggs. This is what works again and again throughout Poppin’ Johnny.

And then there is OUR PLANET OF SACRIFICIAL LOVE, which at first blush does not seem to fit the mold cast by Poppin’ Johnny. There is no fast-talking, rough-around-the –edges demeanor here. This is a lyrical poem, a shadow of what Johnny might have been had he’d grown up in another place to different parents at another time perhaps. But Wallace makes a wonderful transition from the philosophical and contemplative to the down-to-earth in a very economical vehicle: couplets.

Here is the entire poem-

sun fell in love with darkness

and the dark fell in love right back.

but being opposites they could not

touch each other.

therefore earth was born so the two of them

could have a place to meet.

this makes any object which throws a shadow

an agent of their love.

this makes any object which can be put to flames

an agent of their love.

earth, our planet of sacrificial love.

rock, river, truckstop, parking lot.

wildcat. textile mill. tophat. corncob pipe.

apartment house. suspension bridge.

goat. cathedral. christmas tree.

a man with a shovel like me.

It’s the only use of couplets in the volume. And it is one of only a handful of poems using punctuation. From the almost theoretical and theological – "this makes any object which can be put to flames as an agent of their love." – to the tangible and real world of Poppin’ Johnny: "rock…textile mill…suspension bridge…", solid objects which along with everything in the world is thus possible, real and worthy of a cosmic kind of love: "sun fell in love with darkness and the dark fell in love right back…" for "a man with a shovel like me." Brilliant. Powerful. The line is singular and punctuates an immense expression in so compact a space it is one of those lines of poetry worthy of remembrance by school children. It is what poetry at its best, does. It is what poetry does best -makes us feel and think. It is the stuff of what gods there may be inside the heart and mind of a man inflamed with the muse.

In the end, in POPPIN’ JOHNNY, the man himself tells us in his own words "I have got no schoolbooks" and "I shoot through clouds/ they are better than your jesus…" – "heaven is not my enemy/ stars do not undo my eyes/ as for this blasted earth of yours/ it will never drag me down." The poor working stiff, kicked around since he was born, is always the optimist, always the one to step forward when everyone else takes a step back. The American Jimmy Stewart portrayed. The American all of us dream we are, but never seem to be. The American Hero.

Wallace has carved out a milestone in American poetry, a monument to the working Joe Schmo. Poppin Johnny is that long-awaited volume that shakes the ground when it arrives.