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When Alessandro Porco published his first book, The Jill Kelly Poems, three years ago, the response was decidedly mixed. While some praised Porco for his humour and deft handling of traditional verse techniques, others felt that Porco's flippant approach to his pornographic subject matter was shallow and distasteful. As though raising a defiant middle finger to his detractors, Porco now gives us his second collection, Augustine in Carthage. Don't let the high-minded title fool you; he hasn't shied away from the sin and silliness that characterized his first book. If anything, he has upped the ante, not only in gleeful vulgarity, but also in skillful versification.
It is in the foggy gulch between high art and seedy subculture or preposterous kitsch where Porco, like painter John Currin and sculptor Jeff Koons, creates the aesthetic tension that drives his art. Stylistically, Porco is something of a metrical chameleon. The title poem of the book is a scatological, vice-riddles mock epic in the tradition of Pope's The Rape of the lock. In the poem Hieronymus Tugnutt in Love, Porco's nonsense verse approaches the tenor of Lewis Carroll, while Bob Alan Deal is a series of Shakespearean sonnets chronicling the rise and fall (and rise?) of Mötley Crüe guitarist Mick Mars. Here's a quatrain, just for a taste:
Pop some Seconal, chase it with a Sloe Gin,
Or Bellar - the drink I concocted to get cocked -
One part Kahlua, one part brandy, all rock;
Snort an ant, bum a tab of mescaline -
Only occasionally does Porco's light-heartedness feel too light for his abilities. It was inevitable that he would try his hand at the traditional limerick, and he ends this book with 21 of the squalid Irish ditties. While some of these are almost knee-slappers, most are (as limericks are wont to be) mere groaners, but I commend him for attempting to elevate this decidedly limited form.
