She studied music first: classical piano, between the ages of four and 13. I’ll take it as a given that Ono is a marvelous artist. “Men have an unusual talent,” Ono wrote, “for making a bore out of everything they touch.” Anything I could add to it would be dull, and Grapefruit is a protest against dullness. I’d been prepared to rehash the decades of prejudice she’s faced, the paranoid charges hurled by Beatles obsessives, the smears contrived by tabloids - in other words, to mount a defense against further snickers.īut this work has been done. That piece led me to other defenses of Ono, and still others. That piece led me to one by Lindsay Zoladz from 2015, called “Yoko Ono and the Myth that Deserves to Die.” The subtitle is a long sigh: “Why is it such a perennial youthful rite of passage to misunderstand, to underestimate, even to hate her?” Instead she seems engaged in a kind of passive resistance, defying all expectations of women who enter the realm of rock genius. She refuses to decamp to the sidelines, but she also resists acting out stereotypes she appears as neither a doting naïf nor a needling busybody. Two weeks later, Amanda Hess published an essay in The New York Times: “The Sublime Spectacle of Yoko Ono Disrupting the Beatles.” While rejecting the myth that Ono broke up the band, Hess celebrates her “obtrusive” presence in the studio, arguing that Ono was “staging a marathon performance piece” for the cameras: There she was, aged 35, sitting with the lads at Twickenham and Apple Studios, the footage clear as yesterday. Peter Jackson’s documentary The Beatles: Get Back - a fresh cut of the footage from the Beatles’s Let It Be sessions - premiered as a smash hit in 2021. The reaction - reflexive and quickly stifled - was the kind of snicker dreaded by every poet, and every job applicant.Īs I was researching this essay, a strange thing happened: Ono appeared on TV screens all over the world. Years later, in an interview for a teaching job, I named Ono among the poets I might put on my syllabus. I didn’t buy the book, but to my great surprise, it was my favorite discovery on that shelf. Ten minutes in, I was an enamored reader and an envious writer. Instead, after a few pages, I was smiling - really smiling, as I rarely do in bookstores. The title was Grapefruit and the author was Yoko Ono.Įveryone knows Yoko the artist, the musician, the icon, but Yoko the poet? Was this Celebrity Poetry, the kind of fluff actors and presidents churn out sometimes, as if on a drunken dare? I’m not from the generation that scorned Ono, but I’ll admit I was prepared to smirk. I FOUND IT on a shelf marked Contemporary Poetry, but was it either of those things? The subtitle was “A Book of Instruction and Drawings” it had been published in ’64, reprinted in ’70.
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