Sibyl James reviews Benjamin Schmitt's THE SAINTS OF CAPITALISM
THE SAINTS OF CAPITALISM
A review by Sibyl James
Benjamin Schmitt’s latest poetry collection is really two quite different books: a witty political/social satire of 21stcentury United States wrapped around a lush center of lyric poems filled with understanding and affection for the places and people inhabiting that country. Let’s start with the satire whose character and tone I can best present with a number of excerpts from “Creed”:
Jesus died
so that the poor could be punished
for looking bad on TV
for not wrapping their rags
into new inventions with will change the world
***
Jesus died
so that our team could beat your team
unless of course your team is our team
or you switch teams or I switch teams
like incense I wave the remote
past the channels that disagree with me
***
Jesus died
so that immigrants would stay away
so that I wouldn’t have to hear another language
racing past me like a car
I will never be able to afford
Later, a long section tells us the history of this country, beginning with “I. The Old Kingdom” where “We were happy in our hypocrisy” in
A Christian
nation, so
many cars
and garages
and homeless on the streets.
Despite the humor, this is a real dystopia wending its way toward totalitarianism. Schmitt doesn’t name names but there’s a man “who audaciously believes / we’re not racist enough to vote against him,” and another who strode down a “golden escalator,” promising “a world that only he could bring back.”
In the kinder lyrical section, things aren’t perfect either. There’s the bus stop diva with her flip phone, the uniformed waitress “who must forget who she is to remain / comfortable inside herself,” and the couple in “Divorce”:
One day
the bookmark had fallen out
of their marriage and neither
of them had cared enough
to find the right page.
Benjamin Schmitt’s latest poetry collection is really two quite different books: a witty political/social satire of 21st century United States wrapped around a lush center of lyric poems filled with understanding and affection for the places and people inhabiting that country.
But to all these, the writer brings the same caring touch he extends to the daughter curled up in his arms or the people in “Wading” on a sorry scrap of beach for whom “I must smile, I must / somehow try to fill them with comfort.”
There are plenty of joyful moments here too—memories of a childhood in Wisconsin, great sex, a Christmas tree that still holds its magic long into January. In “Faces” even the pandemic is an occasion for affection: “Come down to the shore / and share a little social distance with me.”
Overall, for me what stands out most in Schmitt’s collection is his eye for detail, that thing in life upon which, as William Carlos Williams put it, “so much depends” as in the ending of “April”:
Nearby, the wind lifts
some flowers in a bush of snowbrush
and it looks like a happy girl in a sweatshirt
lifting her hood. The kind of beauty
no one can achieve but everyone remembers.
Sibyl James has published 11 books of poetry, fiction and creative nonfiction, including The Grand Piano Range, In China with Harpo and Karl (about her year teaching in China), and The Adventures of Stout Mama (short stories that cured one woman of post-partum blues), plus The Further Adventures of Stout Mama (including "Bad Hormone Day"). Much of her nonfiction work is concerned with making other cultures accessible to a US audience, including her Vietnam memoir, Ho Chi Minh's Motorbike, and her account of a year in West Africa, The Last Woro Woro to Treichville.
THE SAINTS OF CAPITALISM
by Benjamin Schmitt
ISBN 978-1-7372491-1-5
New MeridianArts
https://www.newmeridianarts.com
2021, paper, 120 pages, $18.00