The Metaphysical Salvage & Scrap Language Yard by Kenneth DiMaggio (2007)

The Metaphysical Salvage & Scrap Language Yard
Kenneth DiMaggio
Plan B Press
Alexandria, VA
(c)2007

I am wearing a t-shirt right now that has the slogans “Made in America Store” on the front and “Because China Is A Long Drive to Work!” on the back that was made by the Save Our Country First.com (company). At the time I bought the shirt, it reflected a knee jerk reaction on my part about how everything that we used to make in this country was no longer made in this country but was being produced EVERYWHERE ELSE. Now the store still exists, in Elma, NY and they still have a website but I remember feeling cheated about a store that proclaimed its “Made-in-America”-ness that basically was selling bobbles. Kitch. Grab bag stuff, nothing substantial or essential to my life in America was being sold in this store. But I bought a t-shirt to express my outright at – globalization? In this context all “globalization” means is that corporations and companies make deals to produce good in foreign countries to screw American workers out of decent paychecks to improve the bottom line for CEOs and shareholders. And, I fell for it.

But that knee-jerk reaction, that Nativistic impulse to flip someone off, that comes from somewhere in this country’s experience too. As the head of Plan B Press, I realize that I in fact published a chapbook that dealt with that “somewhere” when we published Kenneth DiMaggio’s 2007 The Metaphysical Salvage & Scrap Language Yard.

DiMaggio is an educator and he wedged these poems together out of left over bits of unfinished and unpolished pieces that in hindsight presented a lead up to the current “know-nothingness” of the Donald Trump supporter. It starts right away with the first poem : PROPAGANDA which contains the lines

Oh don’t tell me your
ideology or your religious
affiliation just quit your
job and let someone else
clean up the mess


the future is not our responsibility


the future is our ongoing art project
titled Anarchy


In the poem INSOMNIA DiMaggio wonders

where did your education disappear
but into an electric TV-screen
of quicksand


And as sharply as the pointed tip of the reality we are living through right now, he presented us this Polaroid image of the future in his poem THE LAST CLASSROOM CHALKBOARD:

Johnny may not be able
to read or write
but so long as he knows how
to salvage pieces of the Emancipation
Proclamation and the First
Amendment into marijuana pipes
and Kalashnikov rifles illegally made
in metal shop then he will still
have learned his lessons

DiMaggio leads us “astray” through the lens of an educator who is being outflanked on all sides by forces indifferent to values and principles that made this country the envy of the world – once – asking at the end of the last poem in the collection, WHERE IS PARADISE?


so don’t we need
to embalm

what was once vital and alive