On "Happy Hour"

Response to Happy Hour.docx (37.12 KB)

Hi Everyone!

A poem that has “Make it a double” as its second line really should be in couplets. A lot of drink names are poetic or at least humorous; she jumps off the “happy hour” idea to do some joking around. As jokes often go, there’s a dark underside. “Icecaps,” not a hospitable locale, playing off the idea of a “night cap,” a drink to end the evening, but with something icy not mellow; “Fog on the River,” dangerous going; “Niagara Falls on the rocks”/ Niagara falls on the rocks, a tough landing; a Tempest with a chaser of by hail,” really rough stormy weather, with howling on the rocks, maybe Shakespearean tragedy. And by this point the speaker is pretty soused.

The sudden turn in the second half of the third couplet feels aggressive, as if the speaker’s rejecting pleas of friends to take a pause. The rest of the poem calls for more drinking, deconstructing the conceit of the drink names, turning them into vehicles for self-destruction—crawling under the icecaps, dunking under the falls and “chugging” to unconsciousness. The final couplet is astounding to me. “I want thirst to drink me,” feels like a reversal (like “I want Vodka to drink me”)— but we don’t drink thirst. If you come back as a bucket of blood, then you could be drunk. (Aren’t we all already “buckets of blood”?) This sets up another crazy level of word play. The speaker is drunk, deliberately so, but wants to be drunk by thirst. Totally united to, consumed by, drinking. There’s a nihilistic movement here—the poem devolves triumphantly into total slosh.

Thirst is a concept, a word for a biological need, a metaphor for an emotional need. The speaker is consumed by it, two ways.

Why is this paired with Gregerson’s serious, slow paced, literal and unplayful poem?
They’re both in the first person. There’s at least one narrative going on in both. But also, both poems seem to come out of a need for resolution which can’t be found.

My first and still most true reaction to this poem is to think about how it comments on how we are destroying our environment. I read sarcasm in the tone from its start. Our society, drunk on fossil fuels. Fiddling while the city burns. Happy Hour for sure.

The the first short lines enact this with their offhand sound. The idea of asking for a drink named after a landform under a attack is itself sarcastic. As an aside, I also think of nightcap when I hear the call for an ice cap. The last drink of the night seems like an ironic nod toward our demise.

She catalogues other wonders of natural beauty as drinks she’d like to consume and the tone for me builds from sarcasm to defeat. Let’s just consume all the beauty that is left she seems to say. This would be a realistic attitude for a drunk.

Beginning with the third couplet, the poem deepens. We get this with the reference to the Tempest. She wants to consume yet another phenomenon from the natural world but also beckons Shakespeare’s play which has its own commentary on human manipulation of the natural world. I’m not well versed on this but I was able to find an article suggesting Prospero laments his own impact on the island where the play takes place.

This is where it gets interesting. Prospero leaves his island but the speaker of this poem does not want to be rescued. I read the fourth couplet as a sort of going to the source, to consume the strongest drink, sort of throw herself completely at its mercy. There seems to me an idea of sacrifice at work here. I wonder if the speaker is both lamenting and acknowledging her (our) role as humans in the destruction of our world. Possibly she is suggesting a sort of rebirth by allowing herself to be destroyed as well, in a way becoming one with the earth.

I too really hit the wall with the bucket of blood line. I searched and found it is the title of a b horror movie from the fifties in which a deranged man creates art out of people he murders. I don’t think she intends to reference the movie as the title is not capitalized. However, the movie’s plot got me thinking about the artist becoming one with his or her art and being preserved in a way, sort of like Yeats suggests in Sailing to Byzantium (at the end of the movie the murderer/artist hangs himself and there is apparently a line about how he becomes his own best art). I can feel such an idea maybe at work here but at this point can’t put it into words or reconcile it with the rest of the poem.

Let's look at the poem another way: it uses the language of drinking. What if it's a poem about alcohol abuse? The Tempest could not be a Shakespearean reference, but a reference to a tempestuous relationship. Niagara Falls was once a honeymoon spot. Fog could refer to being in a fog... Thoughts?

I realized this morning -- one poem is about hunger (the possum must be hungry"; the "other people" who "have so little" are likely hungry also) the other is about thirst.

The other thing that occurred to me is that both poems are fracture poems - in style and content. I agree it could be the drinking, but also felt the environmental degradation, perhaps global warming in the cross hairs here?
I have rarely seen such wild metaphors in a poem. Laugh out loud stuff, despite the seriously bloody subject.