Peter Davis, Hitler’s Mustache
a new review, by Jim Knowles, in MiPOesias 4/08:
Hitler’s Moustache, indeed. Or...not really.
Page 14 has a Psychological report on it, replete with developmental notes, evidential and historical items, and a historical case analysis. Page 15 says it’s the “..Poetry Reading”, but it rapidly gets surrealistic on us, with jumpy modern camera angles and the poet becoming Hitler and hairs in the ceiling.
And we go on, to the polyphonically-flarfed “..Moustache Jingle”, to a response to a rejection letter, and then a pseudo- Semiotic analysis that devolves into fetishism with young bikini underwear, homophonic permutations on it, and media-spattered gun accident, insignia of how mass media induces mass trauma. (I can hear Baudrillard raving) And a lot of this sort of thing can happen in just a few lines.
Imagine creating an exhaustive riff on an indelible fear icon, that weirdly simple black rectangle that can conjure the infamous moustache and its owner, placing that encyclopedic ramble on 200 cable channels, and add the coup de grace: a channel flicker. I think that begins to describe the wild ride that is “Hitler’s Moustache”. I found myself comparing this to Buckminster Fuller’s “I Seem to Be a Verb”, only this book seems to do far more with words than that book did with pasted pictures and words. It is collage overall, though.
There are many poetic forms and styles toyed with (authentically, nose-tweekingly, and amusingly), and Peter’s book “Poet’s Bookshelf” provides some good background on his interest in those, but that is merely the beginning. Any and all forms of expression that have a pattern are explored, it seems. Government forms, screenplays, historical essays, formal letters, lexicons, cable fan-historicals (like Hitler’s Moustache: The Attitude), and we even finish off with hundreds of “Alternative Names”, from who knows what documentation. And the checklist,.. yes, check that off. And the Marxist social narrative. And the first and last paragraph of a novel.
This was like no other poetry book I know of in scope, and would make for a busy Semiotics class. Or an Anthropology class (is there such a thing as Literary Anthropology? That’s close). Or just your den.
Maybe the most stimulating coffee-table book, but with no pictures whatsoever. Sometimes, I think words are worth more than pictures. Like when they riff on other words, of course.
Think of “Hitler’s Moustache” as a window, a rectangular iris onto the world, in a speeding spy plane. And think of Peter Davis as an enormous literary retina. It’s a bit like that.
another new review 2/08, in Arbutus
from earlier reviews:
"It is the most fun book I've read in a long time, and dear readers it is also the most sage." Rain Taxi
"As a subversive and disarming examination of the 20th century’s worst criminal, and as a smart commentary on poetry itself, Hitler’s Mustache is a success that possesses what poet Alice Fulton has called 'the good strangeness of poetry' and the humor so often seen in contemporary American verse. The L Magazine
"What's more, the book is funny, the way that people are funny and the way people like to laugh at funny things. Like in "Hitler's Mustache: The Teenage Mustache Sestina," in which a youth talks about growing mustaches. Or, as in "Hitler's Mustache: The List of Facts," in which we learn that "Hitler's mustache sees a beard and wonders, 'Why didn't I think of that?'" Perhaps that's the question that we, as mustaches, should all be asking." Rattle
"Davis presents a unique voice and perspective, and perhaps more importantly, a willingness to pursue some peculiar impulses." Cold Front
"Entertaining and surprising while commenting on well-known authors, Davis’s book is a gravely hilarious, highly literate read for anyone who enjoys modernist, post-modernist, or wonderfully bizarre poetry." The Dream People
Poets’ praise for Hitler’s Mustache:
What a refreshing debut this book is, surprising and innovative, and comprised of the quirky and clever poems of an imagination without limits. With a hysterical mixture of brilliance and absurdity, Peter Davis satirizes fiction and poetry with its many forms and small dictators, as well as the endless capacity of the mind to free associate. There is no other poet quite like him. It is hard to read this collection without a smile, and not to imagine that smile informed by a mustache, a shadow, a dark wit. —Nin Andrews
Hitler’s Mustache is mind bendingly inventive and original, all pathos and fury--cartoony, manic, beautiful, mutate-y, postmodern, hi and lo concept surrealism. So weird I started talking to myself out loud while reading it. Muttering and laughing and making snorty or guttural surprised noises. For those of us who live for great strange books, the publication of this obsessive exploding tome constitutes a national holiday. It puts the id through a juicer. —Amy Gerstler
In a trim disquisition on perhaps the most iconic facial feature in history, Davis explores what Northrop Frye terms “ritual bondage,” wherein a character or person is bound by an infatuation that borders on the comic. —Gabriel Gudding
In Peter Davis’ postmodernist Hitler’s Mustache, nothing escapes satiric scrutiny, even postmodernism. The mustache itself is a metaphor for both everything and nothing, allowing Davis to toy with and subvert discourses and genres, past and present, high and low, always keeping us off stride with his clever juxtapositions and puns. He even breathes life back into the prose poem, taking us back to its surrealist roots. Never do these conceits become tiring, a tribute to Davis and to his remarkable first book. —Peter Johnson
sample poems, first published in: Coconut, Kulture Vulture, McSweeneys.
ISBN: 978-0-935306-51-4
80 Pages
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