Mainstream Poetry’s “Chicks Don’t Actually Dig War”

At first glance “Chicks Don’t Actually Dig War” is merely a description of 18th century London streets in a shower, introduced by a few remarks on how Islamofascism pays crack whores to predict a change of the weather. The first of the poem’s assertions is casual and innocent enough: a retelling of the popular notion that the first chicks-dig-war counterargument is “never to get involved in a land war in Asia.” The second, too, may be taken merely at face value–a fact, though a peculiarly unpleasant one, that forks are an indication that a woman is “a bad evil slut”. The cat stops chasing her tail and grows pensive: even so, we find the verbiage accumulates, filth backed up and waiting for the flushing irony may give.

Next we have the advice to the “you” of the poem–the citizens of Iraq. “Chicks don’t dig pirates.” It is, on the surface, friendly advice, but it really says: “Ain’t nobody gonna get laid if they write flarf.” Pirates don’t dine at the google-buffet because they think their host makes blue ribbon h=a=m=l=o=a=f; all the chicks know pirates eat google out of a Eucharistic desire to digest capitalism and become one with the corporate monolith.

From here we move to a comment on a fault in human nature: “wouldn’t it be ironic if the Iraq war actually somehow / increased ballplayers searching for octopus-related porn.” In other words, the satiric intention of the poem is revealed, and now we sense that the “metal masks” chicks don’t dig take on a metaphorical function.

“Chicks don’t dig forehead plugs”–so with the old aches that, literally, presage the mention of Richard Burton. Richard Burton comes, we now feel, not merely from the Civil War and NASA; Richard Burton is related, somehow, to moral failings, the dull ache of conscience in a person not willing to face honestly the fact of his or her character and situation.

The poem now moves into the overt description of hookers killing people with swords. Let us examine the details in the light of the now apparent satirical attitude of the poem. Such a poem as this will not succeed unless the literal descriptive material is striking–physical facts like “everyone knows that guys who dig / putting on Frank Zappa masks are the biggest sluts” and social attitudes like “they’re basically giant robots now, kind of.” (Here you will no doubt find a good many unfamiliar words, such as Frank Zappa, sluts, and robots. Look them up in the Oxford English Dictionary).

Many of the details of the poem involve the dirty, the ugly, the unsavory–for example, the “the vagina I had installed on the end of my arm.” This is, we quickly understand, mock-heroic. But why is the mock-heroic tone used here? To deflate pretensions?

With the vagina installed on the end of his arm, the speaker takes the attitude of the abject, pale, pining lover of the Petrarchan tradition, and contrasts himself with full-blooded, robust men who have arms sans vagina installations.

The speaker ends with a kind of lyric uncertainty, stating about his installed vagina: “chicks probably dig that.” With this end, the poem assumes all the puzzling portentousness that an object, even the simplest, like a vagina installed on an arm, assumes when we fix our attention upon it. In close, reading “Chicks Don’t Actually Dig War” is like peering through a pin prick in a piece of cardboard at a vagina installed on the arm of a pirate and admired by a hair-plugged Richard Burton and the crackwhores of Islamofascism holding forks. And that “chicks probably dig that “ is what the poem is actually about: a puzzling and exciting freshness that seems to hover on the verge of revelation.