In his poem called “Home Economics,” in which he writes about his attempt to bake a loaf of sourdough bread, Craig Kite reflects on how he will represent the result to his friends, basically overselling “the obelisk slowly pooling on the pan” as a huge culinary achievement:
Because life is like fishing:
drifting, baiting, waiting,
catching mostly minnows,
and exaggerating
the size of your
success.
Much of Sad City is about the challenges of living in the modern capitalist world, particularly in New York City, the title location, though it’s also a metaphor. In the Prologue, a poem titled “Solve for X,” which is in response to the epigraph by the rock/punk/alternative musician Geoff Rickly (lead singer/songwriter for the group, Thursday) – to wit, “Our names are X and N. We have no value in these calculations” – Kite, who is also a musician (he is the lead guitarist and songwriter for the band Pinko), writes:
job = persona = self -(esteem)=
champion = breadwinner = good
provider = Station Wagon + A+
Ford Truck driver – you are
a serial mortgage refinancer –
u r a human – resource = solve
for what happens to resources _____
Sad City is organized in four parts, Blue State, Red State, Purple Suburb and American Dystopic. There’s an obvious political bent here, with the principal challenge being to make a living under the circumstances in which we find ourselves. Indeed, “job = persona” – it’s who we are. In “Fuck, We’re All Gonna Die” a poem from the American Dystopic section, Kite writes:
I would’ve voted for Bernie Sanders.
I bet he could’ve kicked Trump’s ass.
I like to imagine old men in cage fights
because they fucked up my economy
and I’m not allowed to yell at them.
Earlier, in the Blue State section, in poem after poem he writes about the precarious hand-to-mouth existence in which he finds himself. “The Gig Economy,” “Moonlighting,” “Quitting,” “Between Jobs,” and “Still Between Jobs” all show the poet struggling to survive. “The Gig Economy” begins:
I moved to New York City
with $400 in the winter of 2014.
I made deliveries on my bike.
The air was a wall of white.
The streets were sheets of ice.
I was blind in one black eye.
Later, in “Quitting,” he writes:
I went behind a bakery today
and ate cake out of a dumpster.
I also quit my job...
But it’s principally the feeling of one’s insignificance, obscurity, that’s so discouraging, the ruthlessness with which one is ignored, even disparaged, tossed aside. As he writes in “Surveillance Capitalism”:
They are really listening to us.
But I still don’t feel heard...
They’ve been analyzing me
like a cloud caught inside Plexiglas.
They can even finish my sentences
and autofill my memoirs.
Then again, how much of this really is exaggeration? The story of the fish that just gets bigger and bigger in the re-telling? There may be a clue in “Santa Claus,” a tongue-in-cheek reconsideration of Santa’s gig:
Santa Claus has super powers,
bends time and space,
visits every house
in one night,
is a shapeshifter,
fits down any chimney,
and yet he does nothing
to fight evil or injustice,
as he chills in the North Pole
all year
running a sweatshop
for elves.
Well, if you look at it that way, the jolly bearded fellow really is an oligarch of sorts, isn’t he? Craig Kite has a real gift for satire. While you may recognize the grimness of the underlying reality, he’s also making that modest minnow into a leviathan. Take “Drug Advertisement,” in which he writes a hilarious promo for a drug called “Lobotomyxidil,” an “orally administered lobotomy pill”.
It basically induces bliss.
Side effects may include:
ignorance,
staring blankly at bosses,
color blindness,
taking things too literally,
and doing things for treats.
(Also blood in the stool, explosive diarrhea,
loss of all your friends, vomiting, upheaval,
and... death.)
Ask your doctor if the lobotomy pill
is right for you.
The same satirical voice in “Border Wall,” alluding to one of Donald Trump’s early circus master boasts from 2016, likewise makes the reader laugh:
Let’s play
Paper Ladder Wall
It’s like
Rock Paper Scissors
except:
Tax dollars cover Wall
Ladder climbs over Wall
And Wall... does nothing
And “charity”? Give me (Kite) a break! It’s all just another self-dealing scam. It’s not about compassion or tolerance. “Charities” is simply:
Really rich people
funding “nonprofits”
that pay working class people
minimum wage
to stand on the street corner
and ask working class people
to give money
to really poor people
to fix problems
that really rich people
created
In the title poem, Kite lyrically puts it:
A dove rolls its eyes at peace
in lieu of justice and leaves
a burning olive branch under
the wiper blade of a patrol car
that’s actively idling on duty.
Elsewhere in the poem, “Sad City” he writes about the difficulty of living in New York if you’re poor, and the self-deception is likewise staggering:
A trust fund kid
reciting a poem
about gentrification.
This is getting meta...
Indeed, underneath it all, as another songwriter, Leonard Cohen, tells it in “Everybody Knows”: “The poor stay poor, the rich get rich / That’s how it goes / Everybody knows.” In “Elocution,” from the Blue State section, Kite asks
Can someone fact check my opinion?
I believe white nationalism
is now as American as apple pie.
But again, Craig Kite is nothing if not sarcastic, and as we know from Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain, Voltaire (Candide), George Orwell (Animal Farm), Gogol, and Mencken – and the list goes on and on – satire is all about making that guppy look like Moby-Dick. One of his funnier lines is from the poem “Napping” in the Purple Suburb section, about the joys of a cat nap (“A nap / is love”). The poem ends: “I am man. Hear me snore.” Of course, it’s a play on Helen Reddy’s feminist anthem from the 1970s – “I Am Woman” (“hear me roar”).
Sad City emblematically ends in the New York City subway in “A Subterranean Hellscape,” with the exaggerated frustrations of the average Joe commuter – the missed connections, the overpriced fares, going nowhere fast. There is much about Craig Kite’s analysis of contemporary American society that rings true, but essentially the reader takes delight in watching him transform his failed loaf of sourdough into a mouth-watering treat, blowing up the reality to cosmic proportions. With a nod to that spellcheck correction we’ve all experienced, to sum up the world, Craig Kite wryly writes in “The Argument from Illusion”:
God is a Duck
that autocorrect
got really ducking wrong
Sing it!