My daughter, who loves Andy Warhol, was horrified
by your Super-8 re-enactment of his attempted execution
by Valerie Solanas, who wrapped her bullets in silver foil
and went after the bewildered bewigged bigwig like a bat
outta hell, ranting it up with the radical ratiocinations
of the SCUM Manifesto, wherein it is announced that there remains...
the rest following, because she didn’t understand the violence
even if she, being four years old, may have got the motivation
after I sat her on my knee and explained how the avant-garde
tried to undo the bourgeois divisions between art and life,
having, in the words of the philosopher, ‘a passion for the real’
such that performance and action were forced to become each other
to the point of inseparable indistinction today, although
admittedly she kept asking ‘why, Daddy, why?’ despite
my best efforts, and I was forced to linger frustrated awhile
in uncomprehending incapacity, the idea of revolution
somehow at once omnipresent and effaced, the chiasmus
of existence cracked into a chasm of refined befuddlements,
as if, angularly disposed behind the TV’s silvered cube,
as you cite on the wall inscribed in a great futuristic X
like the crossing of the arms of the Slade School students
Ezra Pound parodies in a typically-scabrous early poem, it were just
a desperate attempt to groove in an un-groovy world.
