Or here’s part of poet Bill Knott’s 1974 “And Other Travels”: … in my hand a cat o nine tails on every tip of which was Clearasil I was worried because Dick Clark had told the cameraman not to put the camera on me during the dance parts of the show because my skirts were too tight 15 which serves as a great example because, even though this stanza appears in the poem without anything you’d normally call context or support, it is in fact self-supported by a reference we all, each of us, immediately get, conjuring as it does with Bandstand ritualized vanity, teenage insecurity, the management of
...more
