From: "Robert E. McGowan" bob@smith-winchester.com

Your Mississippi project fascinates me. I wonder why the Mississippi River, dividing and joining the nation, a symbol of everything that's not the east or west coast about this country, hasn't been treated before. Have folks been intimidated by Twain? Will you become the Ken Burns of the Great Muddy?

Your idea has gotten under my skin and is heading toward my bones. I'm enlarging the scenario I passed along to you, about an angry Moby Dick swimming up the Mississippi, my own apocalyptic vision, into an epic, or at least a long narrative.

Noah Webster, in the introduction to one of his dictionaries, compared American English to the Mississippi. A great quote. I'll send it along if you don't already have it.

Yrs for madness and muddiness

*

Finished the script
for your Mississippi TV project,
albeit in condensed format
similar to a stuffed computer file.
So unstuff this,
and there you have it.
Bob McGowan

 

Big Comeback Tour

Here comes Moby Dick
heading up the Mississippi
from the delta

past poisoned mussel beds
ghosts of freshwater pearls
tumorous sturgeon

great sperm bent
on sirin’ liberty
conceive a new nation

flat forehead wrinkled
like a flag
pushing parabolic crest

turning heartland inside
out like a ball
new womb altogether

flukes roil cleanse
sand bars batter bridges
overwhelming dikes

sounds like a grand guignole
tragedy moves upstream
revenge on kids and all

cows balloon by
snag on corn crib
scene by bosch

ol’ Huck an’ Jim
stick out thumbs
to slow him down

he swallows ëem up
among his ribs they greet
their personal gepetto

here’s the truth
big whitey upchucks ëem
on the levee

prophets of the flood plain
proclaim new jerusalemic
suburbs of atlantis

share their dream
few victims understand
but somebody’s going to get it

Bob McGowan