just one thing: rachel loden's ‘hotel imperium’

by Sarah J. Sloat

“Dan Rather rents by the month; everybody feels sorry for him, even the pimps.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I usually avoid reading political poetry, the poor thing so often abused with polemic and righteousness, so I was skeptical when a friend first recommended Rachel Loden’s “Hotel Imperium.” Would I enjoy a collection largely preoccupied with Richard Nixon and the Soviet Union?

Luckily Loden is that rare bird who writes political poetry that’s both serious and entertaining. She recently published a new book called Dick of the Dead, which sent me back to my shelf to re-read “Hotel Imperium.” In her poems, she takes on politicians, it’s true, but also celebrity, sexuality, pop culture, power, money and revenge. A heady mix, and occasionally campy.

You can read a selection from “Hotel Imperium” here, but for a taste of Loden’s wit, here’s the beginning of “Blues for the Evil Empire:”

Consider the late Eurasian entity, how it lumbered
into the groggy arms of history where it was

buried. Which is more than you can say
for Lenin’s body, chilly like a mammoth

in an ice floe, if less hairy….

For “Just One Thing” I asked Loden this burning question,

Can you tell me a little about the clientele at the Hotel Imperium?

Well, let me say first that it was once a very grand hotel, but it has seen cheerier days. The lobby is trending toward seedy, like the clientele; both smell of ancient cigarettes and alcohol. Gathered in it, at any point: revolutionists, opportunists, adventurers, ladies of the night and fading men of the hour.

Various central bankers, corporate Sturmführers and other financial desperados turn up for assignations they might prefer to keep out of the Wall Street Journal.

A celebrated wealth manager (and Ponzi schemer) is reluctant to give up his usual lunch table in the restaurant, where he politely ignores the entreaties of a long line of potential marks. The more he rebuffs them, the more frantically they press him with cash.

Other regulars: General Dzhokhar Dudayev of the Chechen Republic, eluding the laser-guided missile that has his name on it; J. Edgar Hoover in a short black cocktail sheath, drinking a mint julep; and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the Bolshevik secret police, jollier company for J. Edgar since statues of him started going back up in Moscow and Minsk.

D-list pop stars. Card sharks. A girl who looks alarmingly like Little Bo Peep (but why are her petticoats in tatters?).

Dan Rather rents by the month; everybody feels sorry for him, even the pimps.

Tricia Nixon Cox and Julie Nixon Eisenhower wouldn’t be caught dead there, but rumor is that they rent a room once a year and fill it with flowers. Nobody seems to know why.

Svetlana Stalin; Woody Allen; Jayne Mansfield (without her platinum-blonde scalp, left tangled in a windshield near Biloxi); James Brown.

Retired ambulance drivers, driven mad by the things they’ve seen.

Some cinder-boy, who sleeps in the fireplace. A guy named Bluto. An ancient bellman, stooped and halting, cursing the elevator which is, as always, broken.

Odd duos: Bebe Rebozo and Johnny Stompanato; Osip Mandelstam and Madonna Ciccone.

A mathematician nurses his whiskey at the bar, realizing that the tools available to him, such as logic, can’t explain what’s going on.

He gives up and picks a fight with a poet, whom he accuses of necrophiliac designs on the corpse of Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Other poets debate fine points of literary taxonomy to the point of fisticuffs. Adjunct professors panhandle at the door.

Pets are strictly verboten, but some say that on certain nights in the threadbare hallways, the spirit of a plucky little dog named Checkers surrenders to the moon.

Find out more about “Hotel Imperium” here and about Loden at her website.

Sarah J. Sloat lives in Germany, where she works in news. Sarah likes red wine, olives and stinky cheese, rather like Marlon Brando in The Godfather. Her chapbook “In the Voice of a Minor Saint” was published by Tilt Press in 2009. She writes at The Rain in My Purse.