For my remix project I used text from Dorothy Parker's poem, "Reformers: A Hymn of Hate", Emily Dickinson's poem, "In Vain", and one of my own poems called "Ella Fitzgerald Mornings and Hot Chocolate Nights," which I will post in a separate blog later. Here is the result of mixing these together:
Reformers: A Hymn of Ella Fitzgerald in Vain
I hate Reformers;
I cannot live with you.
Juke box jazz sultry savvy-
They raise my blood pressure.
It would be life,
And life is over there
Behind the shelf and full
Of sass and class and saxophone and
Blues.
The sexton keeps the key to the Prohibitionists;
There are the Fathers of Bootlegging.
Makes me want to dance the Charleston all day.
They made us what we are-
I hope their satisfied.
Putting up
Our life, his porcelain,
Like a cup
Discarded of the housewife,
Quaint or broken;
Like those flappers with their beads and
Feathers and short skirt fringes and bobbed hair.
A newer Sevres pleases,
Old ones crack.
They can prove that the Johnstown flood,
And the blizzard of 1888,
And the destruction of Pompeii
Were all due to alcohol.
I could not die with you,
For one must wait.
They have it figured out
That anyone who would give a gin daisy a friendly look
Is just wasting time out of jail,
To shut the other’s gaze down,-
You could not,
Reading F. Scott Fitzgerald
And smoking and drinking coffee all day.
And anyone who would stay under the same roof
With a bottle of Scotch
Is right in line for a cozy seat in the electric chair.
And I, could I stand by
And see you freeze,
without my right of frost,
Death’s privilege, boozing it
Up at night though it’s Prohibition?
They fixed things all up pretty for us;
Now that they have dried up the country,
You can hardly drink unless you go in and order one.
Nor could I rise with you,
Because your face
Would put out Jesus’.
They are in a nasty state over this light wines and beer idea;
They say that lips that touch liquor
Shall never touch wine,
That new grace
Glow plain and foreign
On my homesick eye,
Except that you, than he
Shone closer by.
Those days are long and hard and rough and tough.
They say that the Eighteenth Amendment
Shall be improved upon.
They’d judge us - how?
For you served Heaven, you know.
Or sought to;
I could not.
Juke box jazz sultry savvy
Over their dead bodies
Reformers: A Hymn of Ella Fitzgerald in Vain by Bethany Bouchard is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at www.gutenberg.org.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2678/pg2678.html.
Works Cited
Dickinson, Emily. Poems [Series One]. 2001. ProjectGutenberg. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
Putnam, G. G. Noncensorship. 2004. ProjectGutenberg. Web. 20 Sept. 2010.
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