Strategy Essay, Week 15

Allison Joseph's poem "Teenage Interplanetary Vixens Run Wild on Bikini Beach" is a fun and exciting read that is both serious and somewhat fantastical in its language and imagery, a skill which I would very much like to learn to duplicate. One cannot necessarily call this poem absurdist, though it seems to be so at the beginning, when Joseph writes about scantily-clad green women landing in a spaceship on a beach to find "hunky" men to take home with them. However, through her imagery and language, we quickly find that she is instead describing a movie scene with faulty backdrops and bad makeup and lighting. It is interesting to note the change from absurdist to a simple critique of the theatre industry, to what eventually seems to turn into a critique of theatre-goers themselves.

She writes all throughout the poem about how the "vixens" run across the beach in their bikinis, trying to find men with whom they would like to mate. She goes into detail about the constructedness of the set and the ways in which the film is set up badly. She ends, however, by saying that "you" do not care, that the bad effects of the film are not the interesting part. Rather, it is the sex that interests "you," as "you" sit in the theatre next to a girl and hope that it inspires the same type of sex within her.

This poem is very fun to read and is interesting in its execution. What seems to at first be an absurdist work turns into a serious (but still playful) critique of the men who take women to see these silly films in the hopes of inspiring feelings of sex, playfulness, and adventure, just like the green, scantily-clad, alien ladies who come to take Earth's men away on their poorly constructed spacecraft.