A man and women overlapped in their faces watering a baby blooming out of a flower.
Illustrations by Masha Krasnova-Shabaeva

The poet Monica Youn has long found inspiration in pop culture, probing its pleasures and possibilities for subversive verse. Her 2010 collection “Ignatz,” a finalist for the National Book Award, turned the madcap energies and mysterious syntax of George Herriman’s famed comic strip “Krazy Kat” into a lyric investigation of desire. “Krazy Kat,” of course, has long been seen as literary, earning adaptations across mediums, including a jazz ballet in the nineteen-twenties, along with admiration from writers like E. E. Cummings and Gilbert Seldes, who praised the comic-strip form as one of the “lively arts.” Youn’s verse is no less lively, blending a range of cultural references with piercing social and philosophical explorations; her most recent book, “Blackacre,” investigates race, childbirth, and being, through the lens of law, which Youn practiced for a number of years.

Now, Youn turns her keen eye on another iconic illustrator with a new sequence of poems, “Study of Two Figures (Dr. Seuss / Chrysanthemum-Pearl),” which considers the beloved children’s-book author—and poet of a sort—alongside the imaginary daughter whom he and his wife invented. By turns playful and sombre, this portrait is hardly cartoonish, tackling, instead, a series of fraught linkages—between Theodor Geisel and his alter ego the good doctor, between Geisel and his wife, Helen, between their fictitious child (whose name references the symbol of imperial Japan) and the shocking anti-Japanese stereotypes that Geisel perpetuated in propagandist cartoons before and during the Second World War.

Long in the works, this latest in Youn’s ongoing series of double portraits reaches us in a moment of reckoning with and reaction to the problematic imagery in some of Dr. Seuss’s children’s books. Poets are often prescient that way, drawing out connections that might otherwise be invisible and giving voice to unspoken tensions. Youn finds humanity in the inhumane and a poetry in the make-believe world of a child whom Dr. Seuss could only dream of, but was surely writing for. Her sequence inhabits Chrysanthemum-Pearl’s own perspective—“something behind / her face is buzzing like a bee / that’s lost its hive”—making noise and hay and, above all, meaning out of these overlapping faces, grappling with the fantasies that formed her, and with the disillusioning process of growing up, as we all must.

—Kevin Young


Read by the author.

Unable to have any real children . . . Ted and Helen created a fictional one: Chrysanthemum-Pearl, born at about the time of Helen’s surgery (hence her age was given as eighty-nine months, or a little more than seven years, in 1938), and a precocious child whom the Geisels could good-naturedly discuss at dinner parties when the conversation turned to children. —Brian Jay Jones, “Becoming Dr. Seuss”

Each living Japanese is merely a link in this endless chain of ghosts. —“Know Your Enemy—Japan” (original screenplay by Theodor Geisel, 1945)


Infantograph

not a double portrait but one face inter-

polated out of two the mister super-

imposed upon the missus and vice

versa that is to say super as in extra

that is to say impose as in impolite

taboo to force the real into the black-

box contraptions of the imaginary for

which there are many given names and

one of them is hopefulness but

not one of them is father


Pacific Coast

the marine layer like a swell

of flesh so cultivated so lush it

takes on a nacreous gleam the self-

soothing shield anxiety secretes

in self-defense to encase the incipient

irritant in a cocoon of quick-

dry sameness even the sun’s gold-

tone strivings raise only the palest

painless blister after all what is a pearl

but a cyst sent to finishing school

Dream

in the doctor’s dream the egg

doesn’t hatch at once it bides it

abides it is bidden it bores a little

peephole it perceives it surveils it

extends a prehensile tendril a

periscope a peril it dispenses with

all pretense no longer tentative it

taps its tiny teletype machine


Flora

eucalyptus leaf litter gold love

locks scatter the doctor gathers

a fistful the doctor fastens he

fashions a gilt-tiered coiffure

(à la Shirley Temple) a filigree

temple whose crosshatched

discretions screen her secret

face well-concealed in Greek

(à la Trojan horse) translates

as eucalyptus a leafy whispering

gallery for Santa Ana’s breezy

insinuations these invasive exotic

imports outcompete the native

species their incendiary seed

capsules open only after fire


Dream

in the doctor’s dream he sprints

from field to field he fits a lens cap

on the compound swivelling eye

of every sunflower in the drought-

dry orchards each almond’s

peachfuzz hull splits in a sinister

slit he shakes the spawning trees

he speeds a combine harvester

up and down the teeming nut-brown

rows he feeds but there are only

so many he can possibly consume


Studio

in the window-walled room she is

practicing always practicing some

thing is distracting her something

is scratching at the inside of her

face her head down on the doctor’s

slanted drafting table the doctor’s

drafts slide toward her drifts of

avalanching failure ink-stained

flurries of bungled beasties she

shuffles them into single file their

arms akimbo ampersands linked

elbow to elbow a can-can line

of might-have-beens of kick-ball-

change their pointed toes like paper

planes they’re dancing to the three-

beat cadence of her name are you

my real dad she asks the nearest then

the next-in-line the next-in-line


Beach

she’s tacky with lipstick

kisses she’s smeared with unctuous

brags envious mutters cling to her

like limp lace hankies charged with

static she flees to the beach she

scrubs herself with saltwater with

sand her peerless lustre shines

unmarred her scouring only serves

to polish it to a serener sheen she

sheathes herself in a tawny coat

of camouflaging grit something

itches where her scratch can’t reach

she picks up a sharpedged khaki

particle sees its atoms fluoresce

in sunlight something behind

her face is buzzing like a bee

that’s lost its hive


Studio

the doctor is angry he wants to convince

America or those he thinks of as

America he surveys his panorama

the Pacific whets its billion bayonets

against the California coast the native

seaside cypresses so decorative so

sparsely spaced they should be

functional they should interlace

their roots should knot their limbs

into a living wall against the rising

tide a palisade as in sleeping

beauty to barricade to safeguard

dreamy California in her pacific

innocence he scowls he narrows

his eyes he selects his inkiest pen


Dream

in the doctor’s dream she

bakes his favorite chocolate-

frosted birthday cake he takes

a bite he spews a spray of kerosene

excelsior she lights the sparklers

the sun winks out the sky

rains chocolate bonbons paper

airplanes killer bees


Studio

she presses her buzzing

forehead against the picture

window she’s killing time she

counts the little black barbs

of surfers dotting the waterline

their sped-up mini-pantomimes

of hubris rise rise fall she doodles

Xs over the eyes of every cartoon

beastie every former friend every

day every month every year

Dream

in the doctor’s dream the sunlight

fashions the facing windows into

mirrors a trapped bee ricochets

between them a maddened yellow

jacket a quantum of accelerating

light a pinpoint line too bright to see

the little light beam drills itself to be

a death ray practicing frustration by

frustration for its strategized escape


Studio

in the tower room she forces

open every window the Santa Ana

carries a whiff of smoke a scatter

of desert scree a folded newspaper

flaps open like an overeager eagle

a cartoon regiment of slant-

eyed bucktoothed father figures

a chain of paper dolls ad infinitum

unreels across the coastline like

a concertina queue with ink-

stained hands she rubs her own eyes

sees a daughter’s face reflected she

dips a rag in turpentine she wipes

away the inky lines the milky shine

unbinds her coronet coiffure she

dissolves the buffering lustre

down to her incessant itch a speck

of sallow grit flies toward the gold-

rimmed glaring eye of the Pacific