Poetry Magazines - The best collection of poetry magazines online - Simon Armitage

Hi Martin,

You want to know what’s wrong with America? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with America. Cheese is what’s wrong with America.

     Okay, so Switzerland has had five hundred years of brotherly love, democracy, peace and boredom, but at least they managed to come up with one or two good cheeses. America has had two hundred and some years of revolution, civil war, racial conflict and world domination; and all they’ve managed to come up with is Monterey Jack - a cheese that if it got its act together and improved its flavour by about two hundred per cent could just about compete with the most mundane, soapy English supermarket cheddar.

     Every hill and valley in France can come up with its own speciality cheese, and even England - a patch of no land no bigger than a single farm in certain American states - has its classics. But America has Monterey Jack.

     To be fair, it also has various kinds of cheddars, some bizarre cheese balls that are spheres of processed gunk with port flavouring added and then rolled in nuts. There’s also squeezable cheese in a soft plastic bottle with a nozzle, and most amazing of all there’s something called easy cheese which comes in an aerosol, and can just be sprayed right into the mouth without need for bread, crackers, eating utensils or even teeth. And to be fairer still, there are a few hippies out in the hills raising goats and making cheese, but they don’t represent the ‘real’ America.

*

     I was always amazed looking at the soap cans in Warhol paintings to see that some of them were ‘cheddar cheese flavour’. I spent years thinking this was a very wry pop joke, that Warhol had made it up, thought of the least likely thing you could possibly make soup out of and put it on the label in his painting. But no, Campbell’s cheddar cheese soup really exists. And it’s not good.

*

     And drink isn’t always good either. I recently found myself in New York’s SoHo, at a private view of a photographic exhibition, that made considerable claims to be ‘cutting edge.’ The photographs were six foot by eight foot blow-ups, nicely lit, nicely printed, of naked women, some with needle marks ostentatiously visible in their arms, some with their breasts tied up, some performing forward rolls so that their genitals loomed large in the frame, revealed with medical clarity. I soon needed a drink very badly.

     I shuffled to the back of the gallery where they were serving mulled cider. And I thought, oh my God, mulled cider, but I decided that if I drank enough of it I’d start to have a good time, so I downed a couple of glasses and got hot and sweaty but not noticeably drunk, and them somebody pointed out to me this was non-alcoholic cider. I mean, Pleeease!! Are these people grown ups or not? Of course, if I’d wanted heroin it might have been a different matter.

     I was quite impressed to find that one of the guests at the party was Gerard Malanga, one of Warhol’s ‘beautiful boys’ and famous for doing his whip dance with the Velvet Underground, and I seem to remember seeing him buggering some girl in the movie Couch. He’s also a poet, of course, but rather less celebrated for that. So I went around thinking maybe it’s not such a bad party after all, at least Gerard Malanga’s here. Then I was told it’s actually pretty hard to have a gallery party in Manhattan where Gerard Malanga doesn’t appear. Certainly he was looking clean and sober, and made no complaint about the absence of drink, though he did have to sit down a lot.

*

     Then I was at a party given by the Village Voice. There was a free bar, but the place was incredibly loud so when I asked for a gin martini the woman behind the bar misheard me and handed me two. Since they were free I took them and didn’t argue about it. So I’m standing there with a martini in each hand and a guy from my New York publisher spots me, comes over and says sort of condescendingly, sort of disapprovingly, sort of in disbelief, ‘Geoff, I see you have two drinks.’

     How to tell him that I intended to drink both these drinks, and then certainly another, and who knows, maybe one or two more after that? All too often literary New York drinks and goes home, and generally after the first drink.

*

     Some New Yorkers seem to have a problem with the English and drink, or rather they think the English have a problem, which I suppose is to say they think all we are English are lushes. And since here I am writing this who I am to say that they’re entirely wrong? But there seemed to be something tellingly New York-ish about these two parties. Here is a city where to be tattooed, to be pierced through any part of the body, to declare yourself an enthusiast for any kind of quasi-legal sex or drug is thought of as completely understandable; but to be seen having one too many drinks in a semi-public place is regarded as evidence that you’re dangerously out of control.

*

     A couple of friends of mine, Paul and Rachel, he’s English, she’s a Bloody Mary-drinking New Yorker, set out to see if we could do some serious drinking in this city. We began by trying to find a version of boozy, literate New York. We went to the White Horse Tavern on Hudson Street, where Dylan Thomas used to drink because it reminded him of the pubs of Swansea. It didn’t have that effect on me but then I’ve never been to Swansea.

     Apparently Dylan Thomas was in the White Horse Tavern one night when an angry drunk confronted him and said, ‘You know Thomas, if you hadn’t written all those poems nobody would ever have heard of you.’ There’s something unassailable about that kind of drunken logic.

     Frankly the White Horse juke box was too loud and the crowd was too young, so we went to the bar of a restaurant called La Nouvelle Justine, which claims to offer ‘gourmet dining with an S&M flair.’ In England this would be an amazingly furtive place, hard to find, impossible to get into unless you knew somebody. In New York you just walk in off the street, and this is something of a problem. The night we were there a stag party of Wall Street types had invaded the place, and although the groom was happy to be tied up and paddled, the effect was of a pervy theme park rather than of genuine decadence. And yes, some folks were sitting there having their gourmet dinners while all this was going on.

     The serving staff don’t wear much, just a leather bra here, a dog collar there, and the waiters wear considerably less than the waitresses. And if you ask them they’ll abuse you in a mild and somewhat erstaz S&M manner, then add a surcharge to your bill. I didn’t see anybody going for this and I wasn’t really surprised. If you want to be abused by waiting staff in New York you don’t have to go very far, and you certainly don’t have to pay extra for it.

     It was a long night and we finished up in a sort of Hell’s Angels bar full of transvestite prostitutes (for all I know transsexual - we didn’t inspect). Needless to say this was not a place we’d have dreamed of going into had we been clean and sober, but also needless to say, it turned out to be warm and welcoming and far less forbidding than any number of pubs I can think of in London.

     But the thing is, this journey from literary to S&M to transvestite and Hell’s Angel New York, hadn’t been more than couple of miles round trip. We had moved quite seamlessly from one world to another, and perhaps indeed they weren’t separate worlds at all, but more like overlays all going on at the same time in more or less the same place. I don’t believe a London pub crawl would have produced this kind of diversity. On the other hand it would have been a great deal cheaper. Drinking in New York bars, even cheap and cheerful bars, is a pricey business, and this in itself may have a tendency to reduce binge drinking, at least away from home.

*

     But even drinking at home in New York has its confusions. I remember the first time I called into a neighbourhood store to buy a couple of cans of beer to take home with me. The guy behind the counter was extremely friendly, but when he asked me if I wanted a straw with my beer I thought this had to be some sort of slur on the manliness of my drinking habits. However, when I consulted New Yorkers they assured me he was just being considerate. In New York people who want to drink on the street conceal their can of beer in a paper bag and sip it through a straw because it’s illegal to been seen drinking alcohol on the street, and this way they look as though they might be sipping a soft drink. Of course, as I pointed out, if they were really sipping a soft drink there’d be no need either for bag or straw, but I was told I just didn’t understand. Then after I’d thought about it a bit more, I felt I was entitled to feel a different sense of grievance against the store guy. He apparently thought I was the kind of lush who needed to drink on the street; or perhaps he just clocked that I was English.

*

     My New York publisher recently held a ‘reception’ for me. This is like a party but less expensive and where everyone, the author included, has fewer expectations. For one reason or another (all of them to do with the perils of transport in Manhattan), I arrived unfashionably late, and was extremely hot and bothered. Seeing this, my editor said reassuringly, ‘Never mind, come in and have a cocktail.’ Now I don’t suppose I was really expecting there to be a fully fledged mixologist in residence mixing up Screaming Mimis and Killer Zombies, but I had hopes that somebody there might be able to construct a decent dry martini. And I thought good, at last a literary party where some serious drinking might get done, and I said, ‘Yes, a cocktail, that’s just what I need.’

     ‘Great,’ said my editor. ‘Red or white?’

*

     I was standing outside a restaurant on the edge of Little Italy reading the menu in the window to see if I liked the look of it, when I became aware of a street person standing a little too close to me. I expected him to hassle me and ask for money so I started to shuffle away, but as I was going he turned to me seriously and said with all the seriousness of a true New York restaurant buff, ‘Yeah, it’s a fancy looking place but I never see anybody in there.’ I found myself saying, ‘Cheers, mate,’ and realised how little I, or anyone else, says the word ‘cheers’ in New York.

*

     Finally a small something that brings together food, sex, language and the American way. America, of course, is a competitive country and for years the major producers of processed food have been running rather bogus-sounding recipe competitions. All you have to do is come up with a recipe that uses squeezable cheese or frozen dough or Campbell’s soup, and you can win a million dollars. And these are always recipes for the busy housewife so when it comes to the finals, the competitors have to make these dishes against the clock in half an hour or so. These events are known as ‘cook-offs’, in the way that the basketball or baseball finals are known as ‘play-offs’.

     Apparently there are people who actually make a pretty good living by entering and winning these competitions, but sophisticated dining is blowing even through the weary culinary heartland of America, and squeezable cheese and frozen dough isn’t the attraction it once was. So one of the food manufacturers came up with competitions to invent new salads and salad dressings; and the finals of these competitions are known as ‘toss-offs’. You couldn't make this stuff up, could you? In America you don’t have to.

Best,

Geoff