Reviewed by Charles Rammelkamp
Jehovah Jukebox
by Joan Jobe Smith
WPA Press
March 2025, $14.00, 130 pages, ISBN: 979-8315299059
Joan Jobe Smith writes in “Megamorph Ka-pow,” one of many dozen new poems within the re-publication of Jehovah Jukebox:
I didn’t simply megamorph
doo-dah diptera
I megamorphed, jumped over, pole-vaulted
from pupa stage to scutterfly
after that man left me with three youngsters and a fine-toothed comb and I
wearied into that go-go bar sporting my beige marriage ceremony go well with identical to
Doris Day wore in “Pillow Discuss” and I
requested for a go-go woman job as a result of I couldn’t take shorthand or sort.
Initially revealed in 1993 by Occasion Horizon Press, Joan Jobe Smith’s Jehovah Jukebox is about her reinvention of herself as a lady in her mid-twenties. Or, as she places it in “Maidens, Made within the Shade,” “a mere housewife / and stay-at-home mom simply weeks in the past, deracinated at / age 25 at Abner’s 5, a go-go bar owned by the mafia.”
Now in her mid-80s, dwelling in Lengthy Seashore, two blocks away from the Pacific Ocean, Smith, the celebrated poet, writes within the ultimate poem, “Bukowski Chugs Low cost Beer @ The No-No A Go-Go,” about her friendship with the poet Charles Bukowski, who inspired her to put in writing. By the point they grew to become acquainted, Smith had give up dancing to pursue poetry. Bukowski would name her late at night time and howl at her tales of being a go-go woman for seven years (“the unhealthy luck time for / breaking a mirror, minimal sentence for a felony / conviction”). Bukowski, in his low cost L.A. residence forty miles away “listened intently to my go-go woman tales.” Lastly, one night time, Bukowski informed her: “You gotta write about all that insanity, child. So I did.” Jehovah Jukebox was conceived and born.
Smith’s poems about her occasions as a dancer in such venues as Daisy Mae’s (the place all the ladies needed to gown like Daisy Mae, from Al Capp’s cartoon strip), The Fort, Abner’s 5, Shimmy Shack, The Playgal Membership, and others, are fascinating, humorous, tragic, full of colourful characters like Loopy Ted, rejected from the Navy and shunned by his household for being gay (“A Groovy Form of Love,” “As a result of I May Spell Einstein” “‘I’ Earlier than ‘E’ Besides After Einstein”), Smitty, the “scared shitless marine” who’s awaiting his deployment to Vietnam (“Purple Hearts”), Bearded Bob, a dope supplier, Delaney who “nonetheless bought attractive” on the age of 80 (“Ralph Bellamy”), Spike the tyrannical boss, Soiled Dave, and no less than a dozen completely different ladies from Brandi Blue, who wished massive breasts and bought silicone injections (“The Epidemiology of the Everlasting Breast,” “Frying Pork Chops Topless”) to Delilah (“To His Coy Mistress”), Carlita, Jane Avril, Bobbie Jeen, Arayna (“They All Stated Arayna Was a Narc”), Mary Kay, the “Midwest farmer’s daughter” (“California Dreamin’”), Suzie Q and Little Egypt and others, ladies who wound up as go-go dancers due to “the lads who betrayed them, beat them, left them excessive and dry / (the best way mine did, too).”
By comparability with the topless dancers and stay porn performers who would succeed them, the go-go ladies, although they excited the lurid imaginations of the lads who got here to see them (engineers, astronauts, bikers, pool hustlers, businessmen, stevedores, sailors, salesmen and CEOs) have been pretty modest of their bikinis, solely displaying legs and cleavage. They’d dance for hours to the jukebox tunes and the quilt bands, doing the Pony, the Jerk, Mashed Potato, the Swim, the Bugaloo, the Shing-a-Ling, the Monkey, the Funky Rooster, the Twist and all the remainder. They wore bikinis, however at the moment, not every little thing on show, as she writes in “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Membership Band,” “bellybuttons / drove males loopy in 1965.” She tells the story of the person who provided her $20 to point out him her bellybutton, however she refused. He yelled at her all afternoon:
Hey, Child,
lemme see yer bellybutton child however I stored on saying
No.
It’s all so foolish these days.
I positive might’ve used the $20 again then in 1965.
I nonetheless might.
All that dancing would take its toll on the ladies. As she writes in “Heet,” an ode to the over-the-counter analgesic that she routinely used for the ache,
“these fossils of twisted
ligaments, bugalooed bones, so sore
some nights after 8 hours within the land
of 1,000 dances doing the horse and the
Mashed Potato I’d must elevate my very own
legs into my VW to drive house, then
crawl like a canine up the steps to my mattress.
Joan Jobe Smith writes shifting elegies to Otis Redding (“How I liked that man’s music”) and Aretha Franklin, who died August 16, 2018, forty-one years to the day Elvis died, whom she met in 1966 (“we talked males, my man lengthy gone / who was nonetheless doing me mistaken, your males who have been doing you / mistaken too”). She writes about Frank Sinatra and Mick Jagger, Ike and Tina Turner, Jose Feliciano and different performers of the period who have been tangentially a part of her life. She writes in regards to the Watts riots that shook L.A. It provides as much as an image of a fast-paced, altering, chaotic world through which girls have been nonetheless second-class residents and a working mother needed to hustle to remain alive.
As she writes in “Whisky A Go-Go Gradual Mo with Jim Morrison,” in regards to the time she auditioned as a dancer on the fashionable West Hollywood membership that featured acts just like the Doorways, solely to show down the provide to bounce elsewhere, “a beer bottle’s throw from the L.A. Harbor and oil refineries,”
that night time she understood
the ebook of my life would by no means be titled The Good Outdated Days.
However no less than I’d have slo-mo shadowy reminiscences of dancing upon the
Whisky a Go Go stage with Jim Morrison, and although a unclean
dive, The Fort was near house and the parking house was free.
These are fairly some reminiscences, certainly, associated within the typically amused, typically wistful, however all the time sensible voice of a gifted storyteller and poet.
In regards to the reviewer: Charles Rammelkamp is Prose Editor for BrickHouse Books in Baltimore. His poetry assortment, A Magician Among the many Spirits, poems about Harry Houdini, is a 2022 Blue Mild Press Poetry winner. A set of poems and flash known as See What I Imply? was just lately revealed by Kelsay Books, and one other assortment of persona poems and dramatic monologues involving burlesque stars, The Trapeze of Your Flesh, was simply revealed by BlazeVOX Books.
