Worst American Birthdays, vol. XV
Born in Utah and raised for much of her life in Homer, Alaska, Jewel Kilcher inflicted extraordinary damage upon the world when she traded her anonymous life of bar-yodeling for an overly-earnest career in the music industry.
Perhaps, like Monica Goodling, she “intended” no harm; her artistic crimes, however, are legion — and none more so than the several bathetic volumes of “poetry” she has managed to publish, each of which has single-handedly reversed the evolution of verse by at least three millennia. Mercifully, her latest writing project — a collection of diary entries and poems about her boyfriend, seven-time rodeo champion Ty Murray — was derailed because she feared that Murray’s mother would be disturbed by the book’s erotic revelations about her son. If a just God exists, such a collection will never gurgle its way into print.
We might just as easily select the “worst” of Jewel’s poems by tossing darts at a wall papered over with her adolescent bilge. For my money, however, nothing can out-suck a brief meditation on plantation rape written by a white woman who shacks up with a rodeo superstar:
Burn her eyes, without hope of understanding them.
Kiss her mouth, that you may fathom its strange tongue.
Indulge in her brown skin because it reminds you of mother.
Rape her mind, because it is not your own,
but so sweet, so familiar.
Like coming home to a native land
your pale and inbred hands can only faintly fathom.
Jewel turned 33 today, and the odds are good that she wrote an awful poem about it.