Wakefield by Andrei Codrescu

guys from the breast pump convention. Then he orders a special massage. Tightly bound in an herbal wrap, he is left to float alone inside a limestone cave dripping perfumed tears. But he’s not at peace. Tonight he has to tell the people in this Company town something that he, and they, will believe.
    â€œAnd now for ‘Money and Poetry (with a Detour in Art): A Speech.’ Ladies and gentlemen of the Overworking Class: In my business, which is unlike any other business, maybe because it’s not a business at all, in my business, you can say something off the cuff, spontaneously, and then spend years trying to figure out what you said. No inspirational speaker worthy of the title would want to know what he is going to say before he says it. That would be both cheating and boring. A speaker such as myself depends on revelation.”
    Wakefield pauses here, a long, dramatic pause that gives the six hundred spectators in the comfortable seats of the airy amphitheater an opportunity to consider what might be revealed by someone who has no idea what he is going to say. How inefficient, quite the opposite of making a presentation for one’s colleagues with PowerPoint and notes; but how very like those first moments on a blind date! They make themselves comfortable as Wakefield reads their minds. He turns his eyes heavenward, as if awaiting said revelation.
    â€œOf course, there is an equivalent to revelation in your professions. When that apple fell on Newton’s head, it set him off on a lifetime of trying to prove the truth of that boink. Whether apocryphal or not, that story’s made many bright kids sit hopefully under trees of one sort or another waiting for a falling fruit. Not every fruit is Newton’s apple. Some are just unripe figs or withered plums. I’m speaking metaphorically here, but I’ll quit, I swear, as soon as I channel something real. All I know is that I’m constantly trying to figure out why I said what I said—and then when I figure it out, I forget about it and say something else that eventually needs explanation, and I’m not sure which one of those things is important, which one is an apple and which one a withered plum, a.k.a. prune. Of course, the apple doesn’t matter. Apples fall on all kinds of heads that are not Newton’s. What matters is that the apple fell on Newton’s head, no one else’s.”
    He waits for members of the audience to consider whether they are Newton or not.
    â€œI belong to a club dedicated to making apples fall on peoples’ heads, The Apples On Heads Club. Some of the members are dead, like Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Blake, Marcel Duchamp, Ted Berrigan, and Jack Kerouac, but others, like myself and my friend Ivan Zamyatin, a taxicab driver and poet, are alive. Death, by the way, is no impediment in this club. A few years ago, a literary journal commissioned a then living poet, James Merrill, to interview dead poets via the Ouija board. He discovered two clubs of dead poets in the Afterlife: the Straight Club, led by William Carlos Williams, and the Gay Club, led by Gertrude Stein. Merrill found the Gay Club a lot more fun than the Straight Club, but I’d like a second opinion on that. I think Merrill associated free verse with straight sex and gay sex with the bondage of form. There are, however, plenty of gay dead free-verse poets, Frank O’Hara, to mention just one, and really boring dead formal straight poets. And what about the bisexual club? Or the ascetic club? I know poets who are bisexual, and a couple who are ascetic.”
    He glances at Maggie in the front row. She looks mortified. Why is he going on about the sex lives of poets? She wishes she’d hired the juggler. The room is full of people whose desks are humming at this very moment with the technical pressures of the electronic globe. They need inspiration, where is the inspiration? Wakefield