A Man and a Woman
The woman in green
hates the man in the mist
but the woman inside
the man from hell’s edge
loves a woman in flames.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
is like a woman who is a woman
or a man, a woman, and a bank
if that woman’s name was Moses.
A man-made monster
chases a woman who willed a miracle
and became woman times seven
destroying the man called “Rage.”
The woman of the year
teams up with the woman in red
to watch the man from deep river
undress in front of the woman in brown.
The man from Music Mountain
likes to think of himself as woman bait
but to any woman under the influence
he’s just another man in a raincoat.
Man Friday
is like a woman possessed
but the woman from the lake of scented souls
is like a man in an attic.
The woman in the dunes
met the man from left field
no longer was he just a man alone
no longer was she just the woman next door.
Now the woman could leave Cell Block #7.
Now the man could leave his glass booth.
He could become a woman of affairs, desire, or distinction.
She could be a man from Cheyenne, Colorado, Cairo,
or Atlantis.
And he from Paris, from Rome, from a prehistoric planet,
in the shadows, in gray, with a past,
with a name like Jackie or Golda.
– Jerome Sala
Jerome Sala’s latest book is How Much? New and Selected Poems (NYQ Books). Other books include cult classics such as Corporations Are People, Too! (NYQ Books), The Cheapskates (Lunar Chandelier), and Look Slimmer Instantly (Soft Skull). Widely published, his work appears in Pathetic Literature (Grove Atlantic) and two editions of The Best American Poetry (Scribners). He lives in New York city with his spouse, poet Elaine Equi. His blog is espresso bongo (https://espressobongo.typepad.com/).
The New York School Diaspora (Part Sixty-Five): Jerome Sala
In his brilliant “A Man and a Woman,” Jerome Sala doesn’t just deconstruct a popular set of idioms, but goes inside them to reveal their workings. The impulse behind the poem, I think, is both satirical and celebratory—a mixture of tones also evident in many of John Ashbery’s poems–I think, for example, of how making the banal fifties’ word “breezeway” a title transforms it into a thing of beauty. It’s as though we finally hear the word as it was meant.
Sala’s poem begins by creating a rich confusion of terms:
The woman in green
hates the man in the mist
but the woman inside
the man from Hell’s edge
loves a woman in flames
The humor here depends on syntactical betrayal. We are very used to seeing phrases such as “The woman in green” as isolators. That is, they set their subject apart, make it special. Here, there’s no time or room for such specialness. Already, in his first stanza, Sala challenges a notion central to all such designations: that the sexes are discrete, proudly separate from one another. Heavens, there’s a “woman inside / the man from Hell’s edge”—how can we revere an entity so confused?
Rather than unravel these complications, the poem increases them, to hilarious effect.
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Is like a woman who is a woman
or a man, a woman or a bank
if that woman’s name was Moses.
Sala chooses a TV show that depends on the pseudo-gravity of its title and hilariously compares it to a dizzying series of identities, ending with a biblical figure who washes up anonymously on a bank among some rushes—that here could be camera footage. More accurately, the personage IS a bank. Humor leaps from the language, Groucho-Marxian style.
I think that the poem enjoys both confounding formerly rigid sex roles and satirizing the contemporary penchant for denying said roles. That we’re never sure what we’re laughing at keeps us laughing.
We enjoy the poem’s cultural mash-up (paralleling its sexual mash-up) of movies, novels, TV shows, and songs.
We perhaps think of other stories whose creators sought to supply them with deep portent through the magic of “The Man Who” construction—of course much more popular than “The Woman Who.” Here’s my own short list:
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence: Successful
The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing: Unsuccessful
The Man Who Fell from Grace with the Sea: Spectacularly Unsuccessful
A Man Called Horse: Ditto
The Man Who Fell to Earth: Successful
One need only pair the construction with something banal to see what it is attempting:
The Man Who Stole Nasal Spray
The Woman Who Forgot to Remove the Clothes from the Washing Machine
The impulse to mythologize is ubiquitous in entertainment—at least it seems so after reading Sala’s poem. This impulse, when applied to material that fails to live up to it, generates hilarity.
This premise is more than enough to create a successful poem—but Sala adds yet more.
“The Man Who” and “The Woman Who,” in an apparent longing for real lives, mysteriously begin rebelling against their pseudo-mythological roles.
The woman in the dunes
met the man from left field
no longer was he just a man alone
no longer was she just the woman next door.
Now the woman could leave Cell Block #7
Now the man could leave his glass booth.
The poem’s last stanza details a dazzling pile-up of possibilities:
But wait, it seems the only way to escape from mythology is into more of it!
The sex assignments and the tags that go with them can’t be thrown off entirely, can only be exchanged for one another. As at the end of any fine comedy, the characters’ roles are cemented in foolishness for perpetuity. For me, “with a name like Jackie or Golda” takes us back to the beginning of the process, to two women heavily mythologized: one as queen of Camelot, the other as mother to a nation.
The nakedness of the poem’s final names underscores its sense of the perpetual.
Our impulse to mythologize personalities strips real people of themselves and makes them what we need them to be. The poem’s comic send-up of a foible of syntax delivers insight into the language and the people who speak it.
Jerome Sala’s genius “A Man and a Woman,” a series of enlightening surprises, ends in wisdom.
It could be that laughter leads us to truth, which is destroyed again by laughter. There are worse ways to live. — Angela Ball
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Author: Angela Ball
