Radavich, David. America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery. Austin, TX: Plain View Press, 2019. 115 pages. $15.95.
Veronica Schuder
A modern-day take on the mock epic, David Radavich’s America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery allegorizes the formative myths of America and explores outsider identity. Relying heavily on dramatic monologue and occasionally blatant satire, Radavich’s poems capture flesh and blood experiences with imperialism; in a sense, Radavich’s achievement in this collection is that he defines American identity as a complex collection of historical moments; he both embraces and criticizes America’s idea of itself.
Placed early in the book, “Uncle Sam” comically portrays the swaggering, blustering voice of a presidential candidate monologue-ing off-camera to the nearest available audience. But within this egotism, it is also possible to hear the voice of a starry-eyed immigrant who has bought into the reveries of the American Dream. America is “yellow, white, red, and black,” Radavich’s speaker asserts. This clichéd rhetoric quickly turns sinister as America becomes “a free world” in which the speaker “can do whatever [he] want[s].” Uncle Sam, depicted as both capitalist blowhard and freshly-arrived immigrant, says, “I suppose you think/I’m conceited,” then asserts “It’s not intentional. / Just who I am, like the Mob.” The ambiguous subtext of “Uncle Sam” helps establish a mock epic conceit that complicates and destabilizes American expansionism. The poem goes on: “There’s no / Limit to where I can go . . . all the planets—at this moment / I am sailing beyond.” In the early section of the book, Radavich seesaws readers back and forth between artless idealism and brute cynicism, suggesting that the American ego is itself unstable. This vacillation is heard in the dissonance of the text’s competing voices, all clamoring to be heard.
Radavich’s key argument is that we can’t have one America without the other: Thoreau’s civil disobedience cannot exist without the grandstanding bluster of imperialism, and round and round we go. The critical eye of the poet seems aligned more with the mock epic treatment of certain heroicomic voices, like that of the entrepreneur in “Back Up,” who maintains that the “doom and gloom!” behind humanitarian concerns over “humans boxed / in factories, fast food, / cleaning latrines” can be “such a downer.” For those who insist “Shining’s my game— / and reflecting my self all / over the world” the only thing worth fighting against is doubt, and doubt is one trait this poet trades in, revealing distrust of the ideology of power and the figures—Uncle Sam, Coronado, and Leif Erikson among them—who mouth it.
While Radavich may not trust icons, he certainly trusts the power of iconography. In Rattle Magazine, Radavich says, “iconography . . . even in our time retains its power and mystery,” and in America Abroad, power and mystery are “never far from politics.” In fact, the book at times leans dangerously close to didacticism, so that American spectacle, writ large in “Uncle Sam,” is balanced with bemused counterargument: “Ms. Liberty” comments on a “grieving, restless Earth” which we treat so poorly it is “as if / there were / another planet” for us to inhabit. This conceit, while somewhat strained, allows the book’s later poems to comment on those caught in the middle. Sharper enjambments and plosive sounds, like fireworks at a funeral, challenge America’s dangerous naiveté which could lead–and perhaps has already led–to a “future / with nowhere to go.”
Looking at how American imperialism has affected other cultures, Radavich takes readers into the colonial past, then leads us across North America in the Westward expansion, up north to the Arctic, down south of the border, across to Europe to the near and far East. This travelogue formula allows Radavich to shift the narrative from the clownish American egotist to the dangers of American foreign policy. In “Iraq,” the book’s most compelling example of how we rewrite ethics to suit the American self-concept, Radavich says,
It seems so strange
to find myself
again in the cradle of time . . .
I was among the first
in, expecting
flowers, the toppling of statues.
We saw some of that,
and it did my heart good.
Torn between “good intentions and greed,” the speaker wonders, “How many armies / have swept through / this birthplace of / writing, civilization”? Politics aside, this book suggests it is easy for Americans to equate democracy with voting, which the speaker defines as “the voice of peoples / calling their senators, / pulling the levers of legislation,” even though this questionable legitimacy is paid for with bombs that “explode into hanging threads.” As the book progresses, Radavich implores readers to recognize how “the remains of empires / claim their resting place / among the pits.” As this understanding dawns, readers begin to see that war contains “not so much / shock, and almost no awe” but rather just “ornate blood spilling out / from its red stem / into dazed fountains.”
Radavich argues there is no happy ending to the narrative arc of the American myth, the one that tells us we just can’t stop ourselves from chasing after conquest. It seems unlikely that “whatever saviors / we can find” will be able to “provide warmth / and wisdom” while “huddled like slaves / before our makeshift fires.” In “Arctic Air,” sex provides only a brief respite from suffering: “How great that feels / wrapped in furs against / the punishing night.” In this collection, Radavich comes to the conclusion an American should “know where [to] stand” because “nature doesn’t lie, / pain is never abstract, / you feel every / inch of your body.”
In this canon of marginalization with its catalog of the un-person, the song we hear America singing is not triumphant; in fact, Radavich is most successful when he is speaking in the voice of America’s dispossessed. In light of the lyrical and political sensitivity of the middle sections of the book, one of the book’s final poems, “Restless,” which returns to the grandstanding politico of the book’s early pages, suggests that Radavich is warning us how dangerous it is to “never look / back, / never count the repercussions” of the past. David Radavich’s America Abroad: An Epic of Discovery personifies the complex contradictions of American political life, saying “We’re still not together.”