AN INTRODUCTION TO THE "F.U." ANTHOLOGY

 

by David Lehman, Guest Editor

 

 

I remember two things about going to Yankee Stadium with a friend to watch the Bombers take on the hapless Washington Senators in a twin bill on a day in 1959 or possibly 1960. When a twenty dollar bill slipped out of the back pocket of one of the ruddy-faced beer-swillers in front of us, we debated whether to pocket or return it. We decided in favor of virtue and the gent rewarded us with five bucks. The other thing I remember is that he and his pals kept saying fucken this and fucken that. I remember my surprise. I thought my friends and I, or other guys our age, had invented the word. It was too current a word not to be new.

 

In the same sense, no one invented the "fuck you" genre, which can be said to have existed always in that place where pure ideas and impure bodies do their Platonic dance. There was however a January day in Bennington, Vermont, when in a "fuck you" frame of mind I suggested to somebody that she should consider writing a "fuck you" poem. She did. It was good. I told others. Allyson Salazar wrote a fine one full of bite. When Betsy Johnson-Miller read hers aloud in June it drew a lot of applause. At dinner the "fuck you" genre was as firmly established in the realm of possibilities as amateur theatricals in the minds of characters in a Jane Austen novel. In a flash I could see it. We could all get into the act. Maybe Jim Cummins would write a "fuck you" sestina. Could we count on Anne McCarty to write "Fuck You for Dummies"? Which of our friends would cagily give his "fuck you" poem the title "Trust Me"?  That day I wrote a poem ending with the lines:

 

                        Writers fall into two categories:

                        those who write "fuck you" poems  

                        and those who write "fuck me" stories

 

I knew instinctively which category could claim me; I had, after all, written a poem arguing that "thank you" was another way of saying "fuck you." But what about Nin Andrews? Denise Duhamel? Amy Gerstler? 

 

Thus was "Fuck You: An Anthology of `Fuck You' Poems" conceived. Allyson Salazar and Betsy Johnson-Miller and I worked hard on it all last summer. We found that some (Stephanie Brown, Tom Disch, Maggie Nelson, Paul Violi) had written their "fuck you" poems "avant la lettre" – before the genre properly speaking had come into being. Others wrote new poems or recognized in poems previously composed the "fuck you" spirit. A. R. Ammons, who died in 2001, sent in a "fuck you" poem from the other side. Catullus came to us over the Internet.

 

To those who regard this enterprise as yet one more sign of the decay in the aesthetic judgment of narcissistic Americans in love with images of their own youth, fuck you. To those who wish us peace and love, pass the pipe. Are you for real, man? To wise-ass fools who would persist in their folly, we make no predictions, guarantee no profits, inflate no tits, disguise no man's size. To nay sayers, fuck off. To Ed Sanders, editor of "Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts" in the 1960s, thank you for the precedent and the memory of your attempt to levitate the Pentagon into the air.