Waxing Poetic #1: “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

Skateboarders, for the most part, aren’t big readers of poetry. There’s this idea out there that poetry is pointless, pretentious, or even impossible to understand. But like the impossible itself, poetry can get a bad wrap. In a lot of ways, poetry’s not much different than skateboarding. Style, rhythm, innovation, reverence for reference, beautiful lines — the qualities of a good skate part are the same that make a poem worth engaging. Maybe skaters just need to see it in skater’s terms…

For the first installment of Waxing Poetic, the series that analyzes a poem from a skater’s perspective, Christian Kerr looks at a classic of the Modernist canon, T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” to see what the century-old poem can tell us about sacking up and sending it.

Let’s set the scene: It’s the summer of 1915, a year into what would be the First World War. A cascade of technological advances — the car, the plane, the camera — have recently collapsed the collective sense of time and space. Radical scientific theories of evolution and relativity were shaking our very understanding of reality. City’s were exploding, and art was getting weird, abstract, and surreal. It was a dizzying era.

You’re flipping through the latest copy of Poetry magazine, trying to make sense of the world through verse, but all of the Romantic stuff still being published isn't hitting like it used to, the stuffy formalism too strict to speak to the wild times. And then you come across “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and it’s like all the mess of Modernity is talking right to you. In what reads a little like the vivid ramblings of a madman consumed with anxiety about going to a party and getting made fun of for his age and appearance, a masterpiece reveals itself. Dense with symbolism and allusions but vibrating with vivid imagery and city-boy colloquialisms, a breakthrough for Modern Poetry.

T.S. Eliot was only in his early 20s when he took on Prufrock’s voice, making him an early-onset old head. But he’s not just some prematurely slappy-happy kid, he expertly makes the old into something new, eschewing the gratuitous in favour of the straightforward. He’s like Fully Flared-era Anthony Pappalardo of poetry, the articulator of a more relatable art form to the urban man caught in a tech-crazy world. (Pappalardo’s self-imposed exodus from professional skateboarding might make him more like Prufrock the character than the guy who created him, though.)

A century after its publication, “The Love Song” still has a lot to tell us about alienation and anxiety, its social causes and personal costs. It also demonstrates the possibility of breaking through the disillusion, of reaching others by reaching out. Let us go then, you and I, and take a look…

“IN THE ROOM THE WOMEN COME AND GO / TALKING OF MICHELANGELO.”

The poem begins with an invitation into Prufrock’s imagined world, where the streets are suffused with an anesthetizing haze and the parlour rooms are brutal arenas of judgment. Inside, the women, the objects of Prufrock’s desire, are busy chatting about Michelangelo, the quintessential Renaissance man. In skate-speak, the lines might translate to, “At the park the skaters come and go / Talking of Guy Mariano.” Or, “On the stairs the skaters sit and glare / Talking about Ishod Wair.” 

It’s funny in a self-deprecating way, a ‘me vs. the guy she told me not to worry about’ bit that captures Prufrock’s insecurity in a catchy couplet. But there’s also a little bite to his tone, some self-righteous tsk-tsking. As he sees it, the peanut gallery is both hyper-critical and hypocritical, all talk no walk, likely to tag @bussupbussup in the comments though they’ve no clips of their own to show. 

Michelangelo’s statue of the Biblical David also comes to mind. The artist’s early masterpiece is an atypically contemplative representation of the legendary giant slayer, brooding in a contrapposto pose before battle. Eliot sets up Prufrock as a 20th-century version, struck immobile as granite before the challenge ahead. (The allusion also sets up “Prufrock” the poem as a similarly iconic piece of art, owing to a lineage of greatness, like how Kareem set P-Rod’s breakout part to the same Jackson 5 song that introduced a young Guy Mariano).

“AND INDEED THERE WILL BE TIME”

Like a SoCal skater used to the everyday sunshine and convenience of their local park, Prufrock is a professional-level procrastinator. His actions are all in the imagination, putting off decisions to play out possibilities in his head instead. In indecision he finds a limbo where nothing gets done because nothing is done, there is always time “for decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.” 

His is a natural condition in the newly industrialized world. Pollution drugs the atmosphere “like a patient etherized upon a table” or curls about the city and purrs itself to sleep. The bourgeois diet of “toast and tea,” “marmalade,” and “cakes and ices” leaves him sluggish and spiritually malnourished. It’s a world increasingly inclined to put you in a rut and lull you there to sleep.

The world has gotten no less abundant with diversions. Simulations are everywhere. There are curbs in our skateparks to keep us out of the streets and new skateboarding video games that keep you out of the skatepark. It’s easier than ever to shrug and say, “I’ll get out there tomorrow.”

But, as Prufrock comes to acknowledge by the poem’s end, there’s no avoiding time’s passing. The ledge of your dreams can get capped while you’re sleeping. That spring in your step gives you less every session; the last winter of your life is a short fall away. Time rolls us inexorably toward “the eternal Footman” whether or not you’re on board–stunt while you can.

“AND I HAVE KNOWN THE EYES ALREADY, KNOWN THEM ALL– / THE EYES THAT FIX YOU IN A FORMULATED PHRASE”

The Roman philosopher Seneca said, “we suffer more in imagination than in reality,” and poor Prufrock suffers the slings and arrows of an outrageous imagination filled with Haters he does not ♥ ️. He describes with weighted words what their side-eyes do to him: “Fix” as in fasten, but also as in repair, as if to be seen is to have one’s idiosyncrasies clumsily corrected, the nailing down of a loose screw. And flattened to what? “A formulated phrase,” an unoriginal idiom, a dead Cliché, Bon Voyage.

The usual hypocrisy fringes Prufrock’s complaints. He speaks in the past tense and with a totalizing certainty. His unfair assumption ends up making everyone look like an ass. When he prepares “a face to meet the faces that [he’ll] meet,” he picks his meanest mug, thinking it’ll hide his human vulnerability. That’s what everyone else is doing, after all. 

Your least favourite skatepark is probably so insufferable because its regulars have a similar syndrome. Presupposed negativity is infectious and makes for awkward vibes and an ugly overall scene. Fortunately, sincerity is a stronger contagion. Something as small as a Yip! or a Yew! is often enough to make the masks dissolve around you.

“TO HAVE SQUEEZED THE UNIVERSE INTO A BALL / TO ROLL IT TOWARDS SOME OVERWHELMING QUESTION”

Prufrock’s biggest problem is he makes too big a deal of things. Throughout the poem he’s hinting at “some overwhelming question,” something so big it would “disturb the universe” should he try and bring it up. The immensity looms so large in his mind that he’s paralyzed. 

The same thing happens in skateboarding: You set the bar so high for yourself that you get afraid to roll up to it, much less ollie over it, so you stop trying. As your body falls out of the habit, bails, even little ones, become more catastrophic. That’s Prufrock’s sorry cycle. The big thing that keeps him quiet is something as small as a simple misunderstanding. What should be the emotional equivalent of a pinprick pops his over-inflated expectations and pushes him to pack it up.

(Skaters should take solace in the example of Mark Suciu, who, time and again has put out painstaking footage to an audience that mostly does not understand the full meaning of his artistic intentions. Did Mark let boneheaded questions like, “why the hell did he end on a 50-50” slow him down? No, Suciu’s no Prufrock, he’s productive, see the quick-footed love songs he posts on his Instagram stories for proof.)

“I GROW OLD… I GROW OLD… / I SHALL WEAR THE BOTTOMS OF MY TROUSERS ROLLED.”

Prufrock denies his obvious resemblance to Hamlet, Shakespeare’s young eponymous protagonist famous for his “to be or not to be” waffling, relegating himself to a lesser role, an “attendant lord,” the kind of guy that might get a cameo in the friend’s montage but never have a full part let alone a whole video named after him. He’s no PJ Ladd, no Tim nor Henry. To stay within the pages of Hamlet, he’s Polonius, somewhat fitting considering how much both fret over their outfits.

Prufrock knows how his clothes can speak a coded language all their own, how, in the words of Polonius, “apparel oft proclaims the man.” But, ever inarticulate, he struggles to put together an ensemble to accurately speak for him. Even when he thinks he’s got that shit on, that “necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin,” he can’t help but foresee his critics commenting only on his skinny limbs and balding head. That “simple pin” now leaves him “pinned and wriggling on the wall.” One can imagine a modern Prufrock copping some sick Supreme jawn and realizing with horror that his beloved box logo has only boxed him in as a try-hard. 

By the end, he’s convinced himself he’s irredeemably washed, “at times, indeed, almost ridiculous– / Almost, at times, the Fool.” He considers a last ditch attempt to reclaim the signifiers of youth — maybe a new hairstyle? — but ultimately resigns himself to retiree activities. In a similar spirit, the aging skateboarder might muse: “Shall I cut my t-shirt’s hem? Do I dare skate down the rail? No, I shall wear tan tapered chinos, and kneeslide when I bail.” Which is more foolish, grasping for lost youth, or abandoning oneself to antiquity? Whatever the answer, Shakespeare reminds us that the Fool is often the one person closest to the Truth.

“I HAVE HEARD THE MERMAIDS SINGING, EACH TO EACH. // I DO NOT THINK THAT THEY WILL SING TO ME.”

Prufrock’s imagination morphs his desires into mythic, unattainable creatures, mermaids “singing, each to each,” a chorus of sirens luring susceptible travellers to their doom. Not Prufrock though, he’s not even in earshot. He decided he’d rather be “a pair of ragged claws/ Scuttling across the floors of silent seas” than take part in the song on the surface. Contempt keeps him in salty solitude, a self-imposed life sentence, and there he drowns alone.

It’d be a sad story if not for the fact that, 100 years later, we’re still sharing Prufrock’s words. Which brings up the question: If he thought it all so futile, why does Prufrock even share his thoughts with us, the reader, in the first place? The answer is in Italian at the poem’s beginning, the epigraph, a quote from Dante Alighieri’s Inferno which loosely translates to: “I wouldn’t have said anything if I thought you’d make it out of this Hell we’re in to share it.” 

Prufrock is a pessimist, but, ironically, his poem is a testament to a sort of screw-it optimism, for giving it a go regardless of what’s stopping you. That “The Love Song” still resonates today proves either that escape from Hell is possible, or that we’re all stuck in here together. Just the same, take it from J, you’ll never land a thing if you don’t believe enough to even try. So, how will you presume?