Spencer Silverthorne

Gifting Fleetwood Mac’s The Dance to My Mother

—after Chad Bennett’s “Silver Springs”

I bought my mother The Dance for her birthday the year I got into pop music. I wasn’t allowed to watch MTV most likely because it was too sexy and irreverent, but one day I got tired of being in the dark when a boy said Dookie.
I didn’t know my mother listened to pop music because she listened to NPR. She considered herself pretty centrist. I popped grapes as she drove me to the bus stop while Steven Inskeep interviewed an animated representative. Lessons in illuminating, interrogating, or mollifying lies. We only had 30 seconds left until the bus came. Another day where I never knew what was next. It was a battle of interruptions and I wanted to listen to Y100.
Everyone was tired of Beavis and Butthead. I still could do an impression of Beavis and would pull the back of my shirt onto my head to say cornholio. Everyone laughed or told me to f*ck off. I had no idea what I was doing. I was just trying to get boys to like me in the worst possible way.
The boys must have known something that I did not know.
Peter Jennings said Congress wanted to rid the world of Beavis and Butthead. They would rally from time to time.
I used to gift my mother portraits of our family depicted in front of our house. Everything, including our bodies, was constructed out of boxes. Just in case anyone would forget, I identified a mother, father, son, and god with terrible penmanship and indicating arrows. Dots for eyes, one above an up-slanted eyebrow, nails for hands, roof unfinished. I didn’t know how to draw and my mother later discouraged me from pursuing a career in the arts.
My mother said Pink Floyd and Fleetwood Mac were her favorite bands. That fall I wanted to dress up as a hippie for Halloween. My mother asked her best friend to send her bell bottoms with all kinds of patches on it. One patch had a peace sign, and another had a happy face from what I remember.
I drew them all over my margins and on the brown paper that covered textbooks. I didn’t know the origins of this sign. I didn’t know that Gerald Holtom wanted everyone to read the letters N and D into the symbol that originally stood for nuclear disarmament. I did remember one boy telling me that the symbol was fascist. I did remember thinking he was an *ssh*le and then wanting to jump into the TV screen to escape his lies. It would be better there, and I could learn about everything.
The boys must have known something that I did not know.
A few months before I bought my mom The Dance, another boy from a stricter family than mine lent me his copy of Dookie. I wondered how he got this tape because both our parents hated cursing in music which is why they sent us to Catholic School.
Twenty years later, and five years after my mother’s death, a member of my family would yell shut up you f*cking liberal b*tch to a newscaster on NPR.
I heard boys say Green Day Rules on the bus but I couldn’t remember what they said sucks. I liked the Elton John song on the Lion King soundtrack. I thought the piano was moving because I played it. Middle C, but the wrists are wrong! Life swoons in epithets. I learned enough to pound along. I kept my mouth shut because I misheard Day as Bay.
I did not know their f*cking rules at all.
In the mid-90s my father was always traveling to Green Bay, Wisconsin. He gifted me a keychain of a football embossed with the letters GO PACKERS.
I don’t know how to invite anyone to this poem, because I was obsessed with the line from the song, I found out what it takes to be a man/Mom and Dad would never understand.
These misunderstandings between Bay and Day were apparent in my composition. I went to the psychiatrist to interpret patterns like any other art f*g in Catholic School.
I starred as Rudolf the Rednose Reindeer in the Christmas play. My mother couldn’t attend because she was recovering from chemotherapy.
It’s a story that’s told every holiday gathering. My father is exhausted from bringing my mom home from Pennsylvania Hospital and I come off the Bryn Mawr bus to remind everyone that I’m Rudolf. My mom remarks O Yea I Forgot to Tell You, and this is where my father goes CONK! To describe how my mother passed out. And everyone chuckles.
This story is told over and over so that the sting of the grief softens. The way the body has been thought of as a system that needs continuous repair. The hospital, chemo, vomit, sallowness, weight loss mitigate symbols within a sphere of knowledge. Illness, care, and survival involve symbols that have the strength to evade meaning but the sting remains.
I have told friends that grief is a monster. That’s the only thing I can really say about it. It’s not a monster with recognizable scales, but a deadening shadow akin to what I picture as an angel of death. Except no letter to save the day.
I struggle to write about my mother, my father, my family, my solitude, my rage. Those long bus hours, the moments I was told not to cry, not to act out, to pray, to feel shame, to suck it up, you have to suck it up, as she would say as a lesson from firsthand experience, probably from chemo, and to be good, to be so f*cking good, like a god everyone wants to be.
“I just wanted to be wanted” like a bad Frank O’Hara misquote, like his acolytes, like the other men writing like him.
I often misinterpreted goodness with disappearance.
Every time I left the house, my mother, like any other, would say, Be Good!

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Statement of Homage

I love Chad Bennett’s “Silver Springs” because it tauntingly invites you to identify and occupy the role of the addressee in the poem. I love when poets collapse lyrical distances to invite intimacy even if it’s very disorienting. Sometimes we do need to read with distance, but Bennett’s work tempts us to get involved even if we really can’t. There’s something so queer about inviting intimate readings into a poem especially if it involves some sassy irony. Plus it involves pop music.

I like to think of “Silver Springs” as a hybrid poem that flirts with a notational essay form. To me, the poem is about how we experience heartbreak, how we connect our heartbreak to other media, and how we need irony to make our heartbreak seem less embarrassing and less sentimental. Bennett begins his “Silver Springs” with a statement of purpose:

For some time now I’ve been wanting to write a poem about, or like, Fleetwood Mac’s “Silver Springs.” It would be a poem for you. You might not ever read it. I don’t know if that would matter.

Although it seems like a mundane pomo opening, I find that the speaker-poet anticipates or prepares for the potential failure that’s implicit. The intended may never read the poem. It reminds me of what Jack Halberstam says about the queer art of failure, which is a “form that has made failure its centerpiece and has cast queerness as the dark landscape of confusion, loneliness, alienation, impossibility, and awkwardness.” This poem demands intimacy regardless of how awkward it is to ask for it. The risk is that the poem is left unread by an intended recipient. Yet when I read the poem I pretend I am the intended recipient. I write my poem in response even if it has nothing to do with the original conceit of Bennett’s poem.

While Bennett’s poem plays with identification and forms of address, my version plays with the intimacy of the speaker. My mother was indeed a big Fleetwood Mac fan and I gave her a copy of their 1997 live album The Dance. I remember seeing the “Silver Springs” video performance in heavy rotation on VH1. My attempt at the “Silver Springs” hybrid poem experiments with queer intimacy against the loneliness that stems from grief and its various forms. What’s funny about this poem is that it meanders from the “Silver Springs” premise to become an exploration of late 90s media’s influence on an anxious gay youth. It’s a process of internalizing this media as if it still lingers. Perhaps, it’s a failed copy of Bennett’s poem.

At the same time, it’s still a loving homage. I hope this poem is just another node in a network of “Silver Springs” poems written by queer poets. Perhaps, the more poems that are written the more likely the message is received.

Chad Bennett

Chad Bennett is Associate Professor of English at the University of Texas at Austin. He received his Ph.D. in English from Cornell University, an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and a B.A. in English from Stanford University. He is the author of Word of Mouth: Gossip and American Poetry (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018), and his essays have appeared in ELH, Twentieth-Century Literature, Modern Drama, Arizona Quarterly, ASAP/Journal, and Cinema Journal. His poetry has appeared in journals including Colorado Review, Denver Quarterly, Fence, Gulf Coast, jubilat, The Offing, Poetry, and The Volta, and has been reprinted by Poetry Daily and Verse Daily. His first book of poems, Your New Feeling Is the Artifact of a Bygone Era (Sarabande Books, 2020), was chosen by Ocean Vuong for the 2018 Kathryn A. Morton Prize.

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