Madame Deluxe

by Tenaya Darlington

Overview

Tenaya Darlington, Madame Deluxe, is a truthsayer with attitude and an agenda to boot. She’s a charmer, an alarmer, a kick in the pants, a hoot…it’s heartening to know what poetry can still do.—Lawson Fusao Inada

Madame Deluxe is all things loud and leopard print. Inspired by years of watching drag shows, Darlington evokes a persona who wanders the periphery of femininity. Striking out against artifice, staging her own myth, Madame Deluxe is a she-male Vesuvius.

Tenaya Darlington is the managing editor for Beloit Fiction Journal. Her work has appeared in Scribner’s Best of the Fiction Workshops 1998 and In Brief: Short Takes on the Personal. Madame Deluxe was selected by Lawson Fusao Inada for the National Poetry Series. Darlington lives in Madison, Wisconsin.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781566891059
Publisher:	Coffee House Press
Publication date:	09/01/2000
Series:	National Poetry Series
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	7.00(w) x 10.00(h) x 0.20(d)

Read an Excerpt

Excerpt

THE BIRTH OF MADAME DELUXE

It didn't start with pains.
No water broke. It started with a pair of glasses,
turtle bone and rhinestones
culled from a heap of old frames:
bent twigs and nose pads
promising a better vision
a way to stand things
in a way I couldn't stand things then,
a sort of trajectory toward the universe.

My purse swung on my arm
like a balance and I knelt down before god's
bifocals on the fecal rug
and drew up this pair: turtle bone, rhinestones.
The prescription was off just enough
to give the world a heavenly haze
and the Sears Tower became covered in glorious shag;
faux fur on everything.

I said this is it,
this is it to my beaky friend Terry—
I sez, I am never going out without these.
Crazy how from then on
I saw everything in a two-tone gaze.
Even the hip cats had real tails,
I tell you fuzz is essential. The city is bearable.
A new frame changed the whole Degas
and I saw past every sugary gimmick
into the true glitz bomb.

From that snazz womb
crawled forth Madame Deluxe.
All optometry.
All eyes. Ass first and eager
with rip-roaring hair.

ON THE CATWALKS OF DESIRE

All Karl-Heinz wants is a whippet.
All G. wants is someone who doesn't snore
so she can remove the tampons
from her ears. All the teacher wanted
was to be worshipedlike Robert Bly.
All she said was Robert Bly has a balalaika.
You just want to be tied up.
M. just wants to move to Chicago with her man
and house-sit for famous writers so she can snoop
through manuscripts and look at their underwear
under the light. All they do is get together and drink
Long Islands on Thursdays
and write a few lines on the back
of a menu. You just wanted me to say yes
to that explicit dream about the ski lodge.
All anybody wants
is to knock off a good poem
by the time they're thirty and maybe appear
in Best American. All P. wants to do is frequent
strip clubs and look for women who remind him
of other women he has known.
All M. ever does is talk
about the great buffets in Reno—mountains of seafood,
racks of cakes, blah, blah, blah.
He just likes to walk around Wal-Mart all day
with his hands in his pockets. She wants cheap flip-flops.
All you ask is that we floss together at night.
All Dave wants is a house
made of straw. All Dennis wants is someone
to share his Camembert. David wants a furniture store
with moon lamps. Secretly, they love to sit
on that god-awful porch drinking American beer
beneath lit fruit. Cath just wants to borrow
a stocking cap to take Lovey for a walk
in the graveyard. You want to do it
without protection. No,
it's not that way. All we want is for someone to get it.
I want someone to have an emotional reaction
to line two, she says. All the poem wants
is for someone to stick their fingers through it
and wear it around town like a mask.
Lovey wants a doughnut.
All anyone really wants is a doughnut.
The doughnut guy wants to buy my earrings
right off my ears to give to his lover;
he'll give me a whole tray of holes.
I just wanted to say hello,
not get backed into the corner by the fridge
for an hour of superficial conversation
about your sister's experience at Bible college.
Alice just wants tenure. Mike just wants
the Vikings to win and maybe a mousy girl to sit
in the beanbag chair by his leg.
All I want to know is where words like nookie
and nougat come from and if they're derived
from the same root. What root would that be?
All S. ever did was write letter after
letter to a girl he met at science camp, and eventually
they got married. All C. wants to do is hold me
like a baby. We want some chickens and a goat named
Malloy. His dad wants
him to be a dentist, not an academic,
least of all a poet. All they want to do
is write this sort of thing.

350-LB. POEM

My sisters appear in monosyllabic bikinis
nibbling haiku on beds of lettuce,
bulimic blank verse girls
and centerfolds of prose
wearing short words and skimpy devices.
You run your fingers down their soft vowels,
across their slender stanza bones,
watching the line breaks break-dance
across the page on Dexatrim.
Remember,
they are only figures of speech,
lying out on the page, slathered in sunscreen,
wearing punctuation marks that barely cover
their assonance.
They part their titles
and kiss your villanelle.
I, on the other hand, with my appetite
for date-filled description,
bite rotund adjectives
and bloat paragraphly.
I down the lexicon whole,
snarf a raw thesaurus,
lick the spell-checker,
binge between dark pages,
and break out in boils and ballads.
I put on bulky clothing
to cover up my large vocabulary
and try to appear
in small print.

MADAME DELUXE'S
ADULT VIDEO & ALL-NITE DELI

Here's a preview:
the universe seems tender.
Love has reached epidemic proportions,
beyond jean brand or bra size,
but at its epicenter, there is only
shelf life and viewing time to consider.

This is a comedy: many modern films
end on "light" because
its letters are tall and bosomy.

This is family / revenge:
the laws of gravity turn
a couple of teenage girls
into a bunch of vampire blood-slaves
who retain moral integrity.

This is a tragedy:
you strip away the leather,
and the dominatrix
is covered in shoulder pads.

This is a romance:
    You love you.
This is a heartwarming coming-of-orgy:
    You love you.
    The critics love you.

Here's a scene from tonight's pick:
Garçon,
even this glass of [H.sub.2]O can be life-threatening.

Ebert says: once a sex fiend, always a sex fiend.
Two thumbs up. The moral hierarchy turns
the laws of gravity
into the laws of detachment.
Guffaw, guffaw.

Gene remains grave,
shrink-wrapped in the cooler
of tongues.

APHRODITE'S IDENTITY CRISIS

Love is Greek to me now.
On earth there are only personals,
couples banking on the internet
sans pheromones or fishnets.
High heels click a mouse-click away.
The fastest zip drive beats
fine lingerie. Control, Alt, Delete,
and you Escape without apology.
Dot Com is the girl du jour
just a button away.
Would that I understood how the hard
drive crashed.

Call me old-fashioned.
I was born from foam.
Can't comprehend this system
of starless dating,
a crowded earth of carping hearts
encased in complex housing—
What font is this?
What shortcut but to oneness?
Fingers tapping ether.
The body mooned
to a moistureless keyboard,
passwords long forgotten.

From Olympus, Eros and I
watch every season on our loveseat.
As the world turns,
yearning forms a great gas cloud.
The young and the restless suffer
from sorrows deeper than the Styx.
Desire is but an ember
the lucky remember prior
to the digital fix, when hearts hung
in great bunches
commanded by Morpheus.
Then there was dancing,
aphrodisia, and real arrows
opened the soft, micro-fibers
of each beast's breast.

DOS, Basic, Java,
what languages are these? What romance
breeds between usernames
but bitter wanderlust?
What fax machine
delivers an inkless kiss?
What disk knows the drive?
Hackers fumbling through infinity,
pirating libidos,
to download virginity.
Has paradise come to this:
Two screens on a secluded beach
sending static each to each?

VENUS, I DON'T NEED YOU

Sex life in the Paleolithic must have been quite unerotic,
for this Venus was no more than a lump of fat.
—from Sex in History.

Let's face it, Venus,
you're kinda chunky. You may very
well be Botticelli's idea of a good time, but venerate
you I will not. I know
every poet from Virgil to Vaughan has versified
your beauty. But besides being a veritable
floozy and a heavyweight vixen
you're hardly a viable centerfold. Not that you aren't virtuous
(though you were the patron saint of harlots—a vocation
I wouldn't vaunt) but those Paleolithic figurines, from my vantage
point, verge on vulgar.
I would venture
to say perhaps the artist exaggerated your "vestigial"
features (either viciously or with vim),
but your ever-blooming volume
is not going to cut the Viennese Torte (which, by the way, is verboten
if you want to fit into this year's Calvins).
Venus, the stringy hair must go. Your thighs give me vertigo.
Your breasts look too volatile, your rear too viscous.
A nose job is inevitable, liposuction investigable.
Eventually, with enough vigorous exercise, maybe Versace
could veer you toward something voguish in black velvet.
Then you could sit vis á vis Kate Moss and sip vintage
wine, reminiscing vaguely about virginity
to the backdrop of Vivaldi and handfuls of Valium.
Oh Venus, evolve or dissolve. Beauty has gone virtual
and virtually no one is interested in your notion of voluptuous.

Table of Contents

	Sequinned, Size	16
	The Birth of Madame Deluxe	15
	On the Catwalks of Desire	16
	350-lb. Poem	18
	Madame Deluxe's Adult Video & All-Nite Deli	19
	Aphrodite's Identity Crisis	21
	Venus, I Don't Need You	23
	Madame Deluxe's Mail-Order Brides	24
	Academic Tectonics	28
	Pleather Math
	From Oolong to Oompah	33
	Madame Deluxe's Guide to the Pleasures of Leather	34
	Menona Gives Me Vertigo	35
	Trend-Caster	36
	To Taste	38
	Madame Deluxe's Marriage Manual and Instruction Guide for the Year 2000	39
	Anatomy of Melancholy	41
	Deluxe Creations	44
	Portrait with No Shortage of History	46
	A Student Asks the Poet Basho: What Is Victoria's Secret?	47
	Tar & Feather	48
	The Dracula Orchid	49

Editorial Reviews

"Next year's colors will be gravy and snow." Genes from Plath, Sexton, and RuPaul; argot from several Midwestern drag queens; fresh produce; lace undies; clippings from Wired and shots from Italian Vogue might all nourish Madame Deluxe, the unsubtle, flirty, synthetic, sarcastic, and sometimes charming alter ego who dominates Darlington's first book of verse. Sex in the city, cyborgs, "the pleasures of leather" (and "pleather"), and discarded undergarments in an urban river give Darlington some of her eye-grabbing props. Sometimes she's content to break, or pretend to break, old taboos, and the poems unravel into mere lists and riffs: "well-oiled fingers/ moving deep/ into the under-tofu of your flesh." A series of prose poems called "Discounted Sonnets" are as overtly explicit, and their shock wears off with rereading. But when Darlington finds a form, she's funny and memorable: "Madame Deluxe's Instructional Manual and Marriage Guide" comprises a series of off-kilter questions and answers: "Q. Why do I see a reflection around my wife's outer case?/ A. The light is from the bulb located inside her birth cavity. Do not use this cavity for storage purposes." Her most complex poems mix their sex with indirection, vivid description with jokes and teasing epigrams. Darlington's work dares readers to see through its flickering shallows, to find the pearls in an epistemological riverbed: "Oxymorons/ are dumb girls with clear skin.// That's what's good for the gander. Listen:/ love is a polite way of saying alright already." Will this flashy persona reappear? Will this poet have staying power? Who knows? Lots of young, with-it readers will seek this book out and embrace it as soon as they hear of it; they shouldn't be disappointed: "All the poem wants/ is for someone to stick their fingers through it/ and wear it around town like a mask." (Aug.) Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Contemporary poetry has lived off its reputation for exploring themes and topics that have long been ignored. In particular, breaking sexual taboos has become commonplace. At times, these efforts succeed brilliantly. Unfortunately, too many poets have jumped on the bandwagon. Darlington is yet another aspiring poet who attempts to examine the extreme boundaries of femininity and sexual perversity just for the shock value. Paradoxically, this attempt at shocking an audience into thinking that a poem is good because it addresses the topics of drag queens and she-males fails miserably because it is more concerned with what it is saying than how it is saying it. The poems fail to utilize form to support content, seeming like prose broken into line breaks. The rhythms and line lengths fail to convey the emotion of the speaker. Some of the poems represent no more than a list of items: "Idiot, Jezebel; Kike, Lesbo, Misfit/ Nothing, Oh baby." The list continues. The notion of revolting against the establishment is admirable; witness Gwendolyn Brooks, Lucille Clifton, and Marilyn Hacker. None of them has sacrificed the craft of poetry for content. Not recommended.--Tim Gavin, Episcopal Acad., Merion, PA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

Library Journal

The heroine of this debut collection is the flamboyant friend you want to kick under the table for telling the truth in public. But there's no use; she'll only embarrass you further by calling attention to your efforts to silence her. Besides, as vexing as her pronouncements may be, they are also howlingly funny, as only dead-on-the-mark observations can be. Darlington's kvetching becomes addictive. When the poet is not engaged in being rambunctious, irreverent, scathing, or acerbic, she is just plain silly (as when she occasionally lapses into the kind of word-play and potty-humor that would delight most 40-year-olds). Her observations-which are equal parts folklore, whimsy, and sarcasm-may seem slightly askew, but that is because we are not used to hearing unprocessed truth. In one diversion, she likens trendiness in poetry to changing fashions ("shorter lines with less anaphora"), and complains that "mating is a game for hackers" and that "beauty has gone virtual." All this is not to indicate that Darlington's work is concerned merely with the glitzy, fluffy, or fuzzy. Every now and then she lets loose with truths that resonate more deeply, as when she proclaims, "Illness is hatred spoken through bone." Despite the streak of artificiality and triviality running through all things marketable (including mortal love), Darlington has not become cynical. Courageously, she continues in her search for that "one word that is still sacred and bright."

Kirkus Reviews