I feel like I’ve probably done Heathcote Williams a disservice in choosing from his whole oeuvre to read American Porn, published in January 2017, only six months before Williams died. Like many people who rose to prominence young, especially those who are on the fringes or work outside the establishment, he certainly seems to have outlived his pioneering spark and become cliche. I haven’t read any of his other work, but it seems to have been well-received enough that it can’t possibly be along the same lines as American Porn.
So, the search-engine-ticklingly named American Porn is a collection of poetry about American politics, especially Donald Trump, but also the American military-industrial complex and pornography industry. It’s… really bad. Well-meaning, but just incredibly bad as both poetry and art. It has a lot of footnotes and cites various sources for the facts and figures which pepper the poems (yep) but even some of these are misleading or simply incorrect, so it doesn’t even fully succeed as an educational text.
I know that poetry can be many things, and poetic styles are as numerous as poets, but these are just huge screeds of run-on prose with linebreaks inserted. Sometimes there are stanzas, but I don’t know why. In one poem, he intersperses photographs of men watching online porn (taken by Phillip Toledano) to illustrate how evil pornography is, but it came across to me as quite a disingenuous way to use such intimate photographs, and sort of strays into an uncomfortable sort of shaming?
The poem talks a lot about that one experiment with the rats who were given an orgasm button, describes a man as having “[logged] on to three hundred vaginas”, and equates women in poverty spending “five hours a day/Collecting water for their children and families” to “American bankers//In Wall Street eho watched porn for up to five hours a day” because both of them are activities that take (up to) five hours, presumably.
The whole collection is full of such equivalences and bizarre observations (“In the caves of Lascaux, prehistoric man drew penises on stick figures/But they may not have rooted him to the spot while he pleasured himself” I mean yeah I guess we can never know???), and when it’s not being bizarre it’s being trite, telling us things we already know (America’s military foreign policy is shameful, Donald Trump is a terrible person, etc etc) that other people have said already, more succinctly and better.
Basically, this is not a very good medium for the message Williams wants to convey. His poems don’t take enough advantage of being poems – they aren’t pithy, he doesn’t make use of rhythm or rhyme to make the information memorable (sometimes he makes a cursory attempt at *rhyming, but it’s more a distraction than anything else), and whenever he does hit upon an interesting image or juxtaposition of facts, it’s drowned in hundreds of other lines of bland line-broken essay. At the same time, they’re too much poems to take advantage of the depth of an essay or article, too full of random facts for an opinion piece and too full of opinion and unsubstantiated assumptions to be a factual article.
It’s like he’s trying to squeeze in every possible angle on every possible subject into his poems. A poem about a fly that Obama swatted once in some TV interview meanders through the ability of the humble fly to avoid all the White House security, the coliseum-like delight of the audience in watching a live killing, the place of flies in the ecosystem, war, the fact that fly maggots are a good remedy for wound infection, how killing a fly logically leads to wanting to create the biggest military in the world, how drones are sort of robot flies, the effects of drones on Afghani civilians, how much the Pentagon spends on war, how drone operators are basically gamers, how videogames condition children to join the army, a bit of William Blake, Keats, Proust, Clare and Wordsworth who all liked flies apparently, someone’s cat playing with a fly (this is considered harmless play though, as cats are known for benignly playing with other animals in a completely non-murderous way), whether drone strikes have killed future poets, Navaho beliefs about flies, how important flies are to the ecosystem again, and finally how Obama himself is “a fly who made himself the prisoner of an Imperial web”. (Notably it doesn’t contain any commentary on the size/evil of the American pornographic empire, though it does refer to the military as “Viagra” for the economy.) It’s just too much. It’s too much. I’m sure Williams would declare this is because I’m a millennial conditioned to have no attention span or whatever, but I am right on this one, sorry.
The poems were published on Trump’s inauguration and now we are somehow in the year 2022, so a lot has changed and we should give Williams some grace in not having predicted the future or anything – I fully accept that having lived through the last however many years, dealing with the constant chaotic noise coming from the US, my impression of any sort of historical timeline is totally shredded. Maybe some of it was genuinely new at the time? But the problem is, even if it was, that doesn’t nullify the context in which I read it, and the fact that it’s going to become less and less relevant and interesting over time. Maybe it wasn’t meant to last – maybe it was meant to be a call to action in the moment, but also it was published on Trump’s inauguration day, which means there was precious little action that could be done.
In the end, it’s hard to know who this collection is even for. It’s not going to convince anyone who doesn’t already believe/know this stuff. It doesn’t have much of a new angle, and loses any points it does have in a relentless, angry, well-meaning mire. Ultimately it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that, ironically, it’s just another kind of masturbatory aid.
—
*”When the publisher Random House gave him an advance
Of half a million to write his autobiography,
They sent a mock-up to Trump Towers for his approval-
They’d not held back on the typography.”
– Trump versus Clinton
What does it mean.