Why is this poem by Robbie Q Telfer so powerful? It’s a pretty weird poem, with a narrative whose plot never resolves and actual historical facts interspersed with fake facts about real people, and imaginary characters treated as if they were real. At the center of it is the dominating conceit — comedians as clowns and their audiences as hyenas.
The poem’s innate weirdness is a poetic device, not an accident though. A performer runs a high risk in critiquing the performer/audience dynamic, the risk being that the performer might alienate the audience altogether if they’re made to feel too uncomfortable about the critique being offered. Robbie gets around this with the fake facts about real events/narrative about imaginary people. The speaker is clearly discussing some events that didn’t “really” happen, and some that did, and some that happened, but to actors instead of to their onstage personae, and some where the actor/persona line is blurred – so the audience is put at ease — they’re not being asked to examine themselves – yet. But the poem does eventually ask the audience to examine the performer/audience relationship, but it does so by inviting the audience to identify with the performer. This happens in the Big Bird segment:

Big Bird
came out to sing “It’s Not Easy Bein’ Green” and for
a moment it sounded as if there was a human being
living inside of this giant yellow body, for a moment it
sounded like this impossible real person was starting to
crack and cry inside of this now trembling feathered body
all because a frog didn’t want to bother people
by going to the hospital in time. Later, the ashes
of someone named Jim Henson were scattered
on a ranch in Santa Fe.

The speaker wants us to stop and consider the cost the culture of celebrity and performance exacts on performers. By using Big Bird, an imaginary character, the speaker gets us to the point of identifying with the performer and then flips the concept around with the idea of an “impossible real person” inside Big Bird, which, of course, we all know is true — an actor is inside Big Bird’s body. Then when the speaker tells the story of Jim Henson’s ashes being scattered, we are drawn into the real world again and make the connection between the performer’s onstage persona (symbolized by the Big Bird puppet-suit) and the performer as a person (symbolized by both the “impossible real person” and Jim Henson). Henson, of course, played Kermit, so the speaker deliberately calling Henson Kermit (and the other Muppets too – an actor playing Big Bird sang at Henson’s funeral, and Richard Hunt, who played Scooter did as well – see the YouTube videos Robbie graciously sent me below) as if the actors are the characters they portray opens us up for the next story about Samuel Clemmons/Mark Twain:

The speaker draws the rhetorical circle closed with the completely true story about Samuel Clemmons’ daughter dying, and Clemmons burying himself in his work for the remaining 13 years of his life. We’re invited by this to reconsider the facts, real and fake presented at the beginning of the poem: the story of Jon Lovitz and Andy Dick (true), the story of Bill Hicks (true), the story of David Foster Wallace – false – but wait. Wallace’s book was called “Infinite Jest” but Wallace (like Brynn Hartman) committed suicide. The statement is factually incorrect, but emotionally true and it foreshadows the poem’s final lines (“it really is a wonderful joke, you know”).

There are many other stories in the poem, but I’m less interested in listing them all than in the way Robbie uses parallelism to interweave these narratives so they read/sound like one seamless story. The grammatical parallelism hints at a narrative parallelism — this is a story that happens over and over to people who stand in the spotlight to entertain us. Now, here’s the really beautiful thing about how Robbie has used the non-linear narrative. The opening line, “There’s a dark club, full of hyenas, barking at an empty stage.” The line almost goes unnoticed unless you hear or read the poem more than once. This structure is a nod to the narrative structure of David Foster Wallace’s actual novel, “Infinite Jest,” but it also is the logical conclusion of this poem about performers killing themselves both literally and figuratively. Go ahead and try it — listen to the end of the poem and then replay the video just long enough the hear the first lines again. They have this new spooky, creepy weight to them because of what we’ve learned from hearing the poem the first time. (This is, by the way, in my mind the mark of a really great poem, both on and off stage — that it bears being read/heard multiple times, and in fact, almost asks us back to it without really needing us to. If I ever write a poem that is this well-crafted I will be grateful to the universe.)
This underscores the poem’s theme, expressed as a grammatical palindrome: (“We go on. Despite. Despite this. To spite this. In spite. We go on.”) The palindrome and the poem, like Wallace’s book, reboot themselves, calling to mind the cyclical nature of the performer/audience relationship — think here for a minute about how Andy Dick, Jon Lovitz and Brynn Hartman each move back and forth between being performers and audience, and how the Muppets at Kermit’s funeral do the same (because they’re doing things that the actual actors who played the Muppets really did at Henson’s actual memorial), and also how the poem itself cycles back and forth between reporting “real” events, “fake” events, and “real” events told with a deliberate confusion of actor/character — I could write a whole entire different posting on the several meanings that strike me because of this, but I’ll settle for this: the poem behaves in its narrative choices, like the very blurry division between performer/character it is discussing. Its structure does what its language is describing. Brilliant.
We can feel the speaker’s empathy and admiration for the “clowns” and also his deep sadness and concern. It’s hard to tell whether the poem’s focal point, the “We go on” section, is meant to be hopeful or simply a statement of what happens, what we do because our only other choice is the choice Brynn Hartman, David Foster Wallace and (by choosing not to go to the hospital) Kermit/Henson make: to not go on. Is that hopeful? It’s hard to tell. Maybe it’s just sad. The speaker doesn’t let us know. That’s the joke, you know.

UPDATE: Robbie sent me a link to this: Big Bird singing at Jim Henson’s memorial:

And this: Frank Oz at Henson’s memorial:

And this: Richard Hunt, the actor who played Scooter, who died of AIDS not much later: