A poet named Aaron Smith did the Cher essay in the book My Diva, a book of gay male writers making tributes to their females muses. I wondered if Smith might also have a Cher poem. He did!
His first collection, Blue on Blue Ground, has a poem called “Cher Uncensored” (although one wonders exactly when Cher is censored). The poem is a prose poem, which means no line breaks, a relatively new form (your ballads, ssonnets, villainies being older ones) of the last 30 or so years. Prose poetry is sometimes compared to what fiction writers call sudden fiction, meaning really short, short stories. So where does sudden fiction end and prose poetry begin? There’s no academic answer; it’s a fuzzy line there.
Line breaks serve to focus attention on pacing in a poem. Line breaks also focus your attention to certain words or literary devices, like alliteration, going on in the poem. For me, different forms have their different physical movements, somewhat similar to visual art. For instance, paper-cutting pictures are detailed, precise, somewhat placid; Jackson Pollock paintings are fast and full of action. As a writer, when you feel your poem is speeding toward its conclusion, sometimes line breaks make no sense or seem arbitrary, and they should never arbitrary in good free verse.
In this case, the poem can almost be considered one continuous line. You can also see prose poetry as more of a complete scene of fiction than a typical lyrical poem involves, ssomething between an image captured in time and a full-blown narrative story.
Cher Uncensored
Walking to lunch I am Cher in Moonstruck, freshly fucked, kicking a can down the street in last night’s sultry, strapless gown the color of pennies, my thick black hair still stunning, lips swollen from kisses, coat dark as the heart-shaped hickey on my neck. I think of Nicolas Cage and falling for his speech after our secret date when those damn snowflakes fell on cue like they do in movies, his annoying lecture on their imperfection, like the imperfection of love, and the bullshit of fairy tales, how nothing turns out as we plan, and taking his wooden hand I follow him up the stairs to his surprisingly well-decorated apartment out of the cold and out of my panties into his bed where we do it for hours like rock stars, the naked moon exposing itself like a pervert. I clutch his unusually hairy body to mine, and our oily screams drench the room in a disjointed operatic soundtrack: Oh Nicolas! Oh Cher! Oh Nicolas! Oh Cher! Oh Cher! Cher! Cher! Cher!
I could see this poem working either with line breaks or without. The run-on nature of this rambling re-creation of scenes in Moonstruck does work as a prose poem and Smith flows seamlessly between typically vulgar language to funny asides. The point of view also seems to float from a his own perspective on these movie scenes to a full inhabiting of Loretta’s character. There's jjuicy alliteration in “freshly fucked” and “sultry strapless” and his sentences are full of floating, sexy rhythms.
The book is full of other good stuff, too: another great prose poem called “Keep Him There” about going back through a relationship with tender regret, back to the first street-corner greeting. Smith also has other celebrity-related poems on JFK, Brad Pitt ("Have you ever been fat, Brad?"), and Matt Damon. Good lyrical pieces include “Psalm: West Virginia,” “Dr. Engel Teaches the Poet How to Swim,” and “Notes Composed on a Sidewalk.”
His book also deals with his struggle with his sexuality and how he relates to his primary family relationships. One poem in particular, “Things I Could Never Tell My Mother” skillfully gets under your skin with its pacing, allowing you to inhabit his character’s full-blown rage.
I was also inspired by the Cher poem to do a quick Internet scan on visual Cher art.
