I doubt if I'm alone in thinking the Mother Goose rhymes have many of the qualities of great poetry: not only is the form perfect for the song, there is also a speech-like quality, a trueness about them that makes them instantly memorable. And strangely, and maybe not so strangely, they are also in tune with the best of our contemporary poetry: they are dark, urgent, unpredictable messages about trying to survive in a world not of the poet's making. A world that wouldn't give a hoot if poetry were led off into the woods and left there. Permanently. But they are even more in tune because no subject is taboo: child abandonment, melancholia, beatings, murder, disobedience, theft, you name it, it's all right up front in smacking bright colors balanced by a courage and resilience and skepticism mirroring that of our best poets.
This homage to the Great Mother began to take shape when some very peculiar drawings of the nursery characters were given to me by a local artist. Let’s just say they were peculiar enough to set off a whole new parade of characters bouncing around inside my head like they couldn’t wait to get out. And while the little devils were all doing pretty much the same old schtick, they were also a bit older now, and a little wiser, a little more hip. Indeed, I had a sense they were trying to report what had happened to them during the fifty-odd years since we had last kept serious company.
And then it all came to me in a sudden fall: not as rhymes, however, but prose poems: a collection of speech-like, out-of-control, falling-down-the-elevator-shaft raps that somehow revealed both my own colors and those of the nursery characters in a way I could never have predicted. It was as if I were standing in the middle of Mott Street City looking up at the sky and something fell into the palms of my hands that looked like white squares of nougat, the kind with all the little colored jelly pieces stuck in them. They were gorgeous. And peculiar. And nasty. Just what the doctor ordered.
Justin Spring
Merida Yucatan Mexico
2011