Can Americans Still Fit Into Their Jeans?
A poet asks the important questions.
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Painfully aware of my students’ exiguous attention spans, I try to keep up with the world of contemporary poetry, hoping to find something with enough flair and pizzazz to keep their interest. I don’t always succeed, but I occasionally find some interesting things along the way.
The website PoetryFoundation is an excellent resource for everything poetry-related and is where I found Kara Jackson’s “anthem for my belly after eating too much”.
It’s not a dazzling poem, but it discloses some curious things about young Americans and deals with its subject lightly, a rare quality in these vituperative times.
The first few lines of the poem reveal the speaker’s youthful self-obsession and phrasing:
i look in the mirror, and all the chips i’ve eaten
this month have accumulated
like schoolwork at the bottom of my tummy,
The omnipresent lowercase contributes to the sense of immaturity. A child herself, the speaker talks to her belly as if she’s pregnant: she soothes it (“my belly, my belly”), talks about its “growing flesh” and says she will “watch [it] reach toward everything possible.”
Yet the speaker lacks a child’s insouciance or a mother’s expectant glow: she’s at war with her belly and its “army / of solids, militia of grease.”
This recalls God’s punishment of Eve in Genesis: “I will terribly sharpen your birth pangs, / in pain shall you bear children.” (Robert Alter’s translation.)
Here, though, the woman’s aches aren’t related to her womb but her gut. The pain isn’t linked to the creation of new life but the creation of new lard. Fat replaces baby.
In literature, fatness is sometimes associated with abundant life and creative energy (consider Sir John Falstaff and Les Murray). The speaker of this poem, however, tries to restrain her corpulence:
americans love excess, but we also love jeans,
and refuse to make excess comfortable in them.
i step into a fashionable prison,
Limiting excess is what poets do, especially when they employ rhyme and metre, which this poem lacks. The speaker’s effort to fit into jeans resembles the poet’s effort to fit ideas into a structure.
Generally, literary and cultural critics don’t pay enough attention to clothes. (The Shakespeare scholar Marjorie Garber is an honourable exception.)
Clothes are character made visible. If you want proof of America’s irresistible cultural imperialism, a force so strong it helped defeat the Soviet Union, regard the ubiquitous trousers of blue denim and copper rivets. Originally designed for miners, jeans are now worn by everyone, especially people whose work involves no manual labour.
The average Silicon Valley executive loves appearing in jeans, giving the impression that he’s as rebellious as James Dean despite earning a thousand bucks a minute and designing robots to monitor every second of your life – a sort of class cosplay.
“Clothes are character made visible.”
People, jeans are neither comfy nor stylish.
I’m not the only one to notice. Kara Jackson’s poem reveals an interesting contradiction in the American mind: jeans and excess can’t co-exist.
But this observation is already outdated.
Look around: jeans are slowly being replaced by sweatpants and activewear. With such endlessly pliable clothes, one needn’t deny oneself anything. Kara Jackson’s speaker calls her belly “a country i’m trying to love.” This refers to her belly’s size, but also reveals that, in producing feelings of admiration and loyalty, contours have replaced countries.
The speaker is an example what someone can become if not careful: a self-worshipping Venus of Willendorf.