JEHOVAH JUKEBOX by Joan Jobe Smith
A review by Zack Kopp
In these poems, plastic surgeons make a thousand a week per customer as Sinatra gets sent back to heaven and Bukowski chugs cheap beer at the No-No a Go-Go, one night finally telling the author, “’You gotta write about that madness, kid.’ So I did.” (115) Joan Jobe Smith made a living as a go go girl in the drug-induced hang-out years of the 1960s and 70s simultaneous to the heyday of Women’s Liberation in pop consciousness. She embodies the same moral ambiguity as her platonic friend Charles Bukowski, a paradox of idealism defeated by realism—in Smith’s case, the need to make money as a single mother. These poems are reportage and sociological exposition, from the Playgirl Club to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Jukebox Jehovah is an entire universe-in-miniature of dirty dancing and blown-dry hair and Agent Orange, including a Foreword by Jobe’s husband since 1990, the recently-departed poet Fred Voss (Someday There will be Machine Shops Full of Roses, others).
Smith is an underground historian by way of her poetry bringing us tales of her adventures in society’s hidden wildside. In her latest collection Jehovah Jukebox, Smith revisits the world of gaslit phantasmagoria she lived in her go go youth on glass stages in dimly lit dives full of drunken misogynists living out power fantasies, a few years highly formative to the mission of her work. Crazy Ted is one of the characters, as are Brandy Blue and Dirty Dave the Daisy Mae Manager. Smith’s poems are prosaic observations of this tilted neon world, where 80 year old men still get horny and 20-something waitresses try to hold back sunsets with their tongues. “the guys’ wives and dates/ frowned at our tarantula eyelashes,/ . . . sometimes one of them asking,/ ‘How can you do such a thing?’/ . . . But then, during our second break,/ after they’d had a few beers, they’d ask/ what kind of eyelash glue or hairspray we used,/ how did we learn to do the Pony, Jerk,/ and Mashed Potato so good” (63)
Smith was born in Paris, Texas in 1940. Her poetry, prose, art, reviews, essays, and cooking columns have appeared internationally in more than 1000 publications—including one couplet on a billboard across Southern California as a child. She is the founding editor of the literary journals Pearl and Bukowski Review. In “A Vaudville of Devils”, she writes, “For months I’d managed to keep it/ secret from my landlord that my/ husband had left me and I was working/ as a Go-go girl,” tiptoeing around conventional mores for peace of mind like a refugee while doing whatever she can to support her child. “former my landlord hated divorcees,/ called them whores and broke their/windows and porchlights/ to get them to move out/…but mostly he was the kind of man / who becomes a landlord/ because he loves being called a lord/. . . which I really didn’t mind so much/ for I understood his urge to purge his soul/ with rants, I knew his kind of man by then/ . . . for by then I’d become all women of the without/ a whore, a witch and a go-go-girl/ dancing in vaudeville/ of devils.” (77-8)
***
Jehovah Jukebox by Joan Jobe Smith is available for purchase at Amazon.
Zack Kopp holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts and blows a blue harmonica. You can find his frequently-updated blog at www.campelasticity.com and all his books at Amazon. His latest work of fiction, Main Character Syndrome, was published in Feb of 2024, and a collection of interviews, essays, and commentary called Rare But Serious was just published (http://www.rarebutserious.com
