Girlfriend Is Paula Cole
During my college years back in the Reagan 1980s, when we had our “ethnic” encounter groupings for the sake of “diversity,” a very odd outburst would occur when a young man with strong African features would stand up in the “multi-cultural” crowd and announce—no, he would vow—that he would not have sex with “white women.” This happened at least three times in my presence and to report these events to you now feels very much like reporting a UFO sighting.
And because you are likely to be very bright—to actually be interested in what is written here—you may wonder why the time is taken by me to write about this. You may very likely be a naturalized citizen of the United States, which means instantly to me that you are an extremist—and it is this extremism that makes you wonder only two things: do I support the brother who made his vow or do I not. I’m either for him or I am against him. Extremism, baby.
An “artistic” decision was made years ago to confront this extremism by writing the poem “girlfriend is paula cole.” This poem is now presented as a two-part sound recording in the digitized collection called “Bryan D. Wilhite: Invisible Man” here at kintespace.com.
Paula Cole was a very big pop star a few years ago and she no doubt upset very many would-be fans by “flaunting” her “African boyfriend” for all the world. So my poem starts with the premise that “i have a girlfriend just like paula cole.” This technique borrows from Warhol and the pop art scene, leveraging images seared into the general-public imagination by mass media and then ‘repurposing’ them for my sake of poetry. Leveraging the public image of Paula Cole is intended to take you away from stereotypical images of the “white girlfriend” for example wikipedia.org writes:
In the past, Paula Cole created some controversy by appearing in public wearing tank tops and sleeveless shirts, and even totally nude on the This Fire album cover, without shaving her armpits. One magazine, Entertainment Weekly enraged Cole after airbrushing her armpit hair out of its cover photo. They eventually ran the unaltered photo and Paula’s letter to them, citing that the editors of the magazine thought it was a smudge on the photograph “until we saw the Grammys.”
So, on the other hand, you may be very, very serious and you want to see this whole issue not from one unknown poet’s view but from a professional academician’s research. Do see the work of Dr. Cassandra Jackson, Assistant Professor of The College of New Jersey. Her book Barriers Between Us: Interracial Sex In Nineteenth-century American Literature, should place my writing in context so large that my efforts should disappear entirely. This book seems to be directly endorsed by Dr. Margo Natalie Crawford because she wrote a book review of Jackson’s work that is downloadable from Amazon.com. My past experience with Margo Natalie Crawford informs me that she does not waste her time with lollygaggers so I can safely recommend whatever literature she sees as valuable.