The Beautiful: Collected Poems.

By Michelle Tea. San Francisco: Manic D Press, $13.95

"Why do we have to read all this Hate America First literature?" So begins one of the last class periods of my sophomore level American literature survey in a recent semester at Coastal Carolina University. I had assigned Allen Ginsberg's

poem, "America," paired with the very contemporary revisitation of this poem by Michelle Tea, "The Beautiful." Ginsberg addresses America as someone who let him down: "America I've given you all and now I'm nothing." As part of the Beat movement of poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, Ginsberg expresses horror and alienation in a post-WWII American culture and couches his dissatisfaction in obscenities designed to match the obscenities of the Holocaust and Hiroshima: "Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb." This anti-war sentiment struck me as a timely conclusion to our class, as the war in Iraq drags on and the death count climbs higher every day.

Michelle Tea puts her own queer shoulder to the wheel, updating Ginsberg's poem in a twisted love letter to a (national) romance gone wrong. America, to Tea, is beautiful but dangerous, as "we destroy / a little bit / of everything / we pass," and she recalls Ginsberg's anti-nuclear language in this era of WMDs (weapons of mass destruction), ironically reminding her readers of "the bomb tucked / dearly / into farm land."

The best part of the poem, however, comes when Tea makes the conceit of railing at America her own, turning America into her "shitty parents" and then her "bad relationship." The rapidly shifting dynamics of passive-aggressive codependency shape her pleas to "go to/couple's counseling" with America to "talk about/ all this / bad energy," followed by the self-annihilation of the desperate wannabe girlfriend: "oh america i love you/i just want to/go on a date with you/and you won't even give me/the time of day." Finally she downshifts into bare-faced rage, muttering, "stuck up bitch/think you're too good for me America." "I could write you an anthem," Tea offers, "but you have so many/ fuck you/ america/ you're just so emotionally unavailable."

Once Tea announces she doesn't want to maintain a relationship with a "bad/communicator" who has "serious/ boundary issues," America becomes the aggressor: "i keep getting all these hang-up calls/ i know/it's you america / you better cut the shit/ i'm getting a restraining order." Picturing America as a withholding lover--"we've been together/all these years/and you still won't let me call you/girlfriend"--Tea expresses the alienation of Generation X from a nation that promised civil rights, prosperity, and global good nature, then worked to abolish affirmative action, outsource jobs, and make war on the Third World.

The student who labeled these works "hate America first" sparked a very uncomfortable debate over patriotism and the place of politics in a literature classroom. Several students jumped on the "love it or leave it" bandwagon, and the ones who experienced these sentiments as reactionary unfortunately stayed quiet until after class. I was not aware during the class period that any of the students appreciated Ginsberg or Tea, so I made strenuous, if delicately phrased, efforts to show the flaw of logic in suggesting that a person who criticizes America should leave it. I offered instead the possibility that criticism is a gesture of love and patriotism, providing the foundation for positive social change and the backbone of American literature. I kept bringing up the lines, "i could have anyone/canada london/amsterdam/is in love with me/but it's you i want/ America," as proof that Tea has mixed feelings for America, and that characterizing her simply as "hating on" America shows a blatant disregard for the words on the page.

Even though the conversation did not go as I hoped it would, and I am not fully satisfied with my efficacy in turning students' attention from ideological cliches to the complexities of the texts, I remain convinced that the questions--What are these authors criticizing America for? In what specific ways do Ginsberg and Tea feel let down by America?--hold the potential for shaping a lively and socially meaningful class discussion, and I console myself by imagining that for a few students, these questions continue to sift through their consciousnesses, perhaps forming a counterdiscourse to the headlines on Fox news or the latest Presidential statement on the benevolent American way.

Merri Lisa Johnson

Coastal Carolina University