President Barack Obama’s poem, “Pop,” consists of one 45-line free verse paragraph. The poem offers a sketch of the speaker’s grandfather and a glimpse into the relationship between grandfather and grandson.
“Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken”
The speaker places his grandfather in his usual chair where the latter watches television, while enjoying his “Seagrams, neat.” The grandfather, called Pop, is accosting the young man by rhetorically questioning him, asking, “What to do with me.” The speaker asserts that Pop thinks his grandson is just a “green young man / Who fails to consider the / Flim and flam of the world.”
Pop advises his grandson that his sheltered existence is responsible for the young man’s ignorance of the “flim-flam” world. The speaker just stares at the old man, who seems to exhibit a facial tick, with his eyes darting off “in different directions / And his slow, unwelcome twitches.”
“I listen, nod”
The speaker then employs a surrealistic style as he continues to describe his encounter with Pop. The speaker listens politely, nodding occasionally, as the old man declaims, but suddenly the speaker is “cling[ing] to the old man’s “[b]eige T-shirt, yelling / Yelling in his ears.” Those ears have “heavy lobes,” and the old man is “still telling / His joke.” But the speaker then asks Pop “why / He’s so unhappy.”
Pop starts to respond, but the speaker does not “care anymore, cause / He took too damn long.” The speaker then pulls out a mirror from under his seat. The confusion here mounts because the speaker had just claimed he was clinging to Pop’s shirt and yelling in the old man’s ear, which would have taken the speaker out of his seat. This confusion adds to the surreal nature of the episode.
After pulling out the mirror, the speaker asserts that he is “laughing, / Laughing loud.” What he does with the mirror is never made clear. But during his outbreak of laughter, Pop “grows small” shrinking to a “spot in [the speaker’s] brain.” That tiny spot, however, “may be squeezed out, like a / Watermelon seed between / Two fingers.”
“Pop takes another shot, neat”
The speaker observes that Pop “takes another shot, neat,” but he probably means that the old man took another gulp; it is not likely that the grandfather is measuring out each swig with a shot glass. With this gulp, Pop “points out the same amber / Stain on his shorts that I’ve got on mine, and / Makes me smell his smell, coming / From me.” During the exchange, while clinging to Pop’s shirt, the speaker has stained Pop’s shorts, and Pop wants the speaker to realize his blame for the stain.
Pop then changes TV channels and “recites an old poem / He wrote before his mother died.” He then rises from his seat, “shouts, and asks / For a hug.” The younger man realizes his smallness before the size of Pop: “my / Arms barely reaching around / His thick, oily neck, and his broad back.” But the speaker sees himself reflected in Pop’s “black-framed glasses.” And now Pop is “laughing too.”
Commentary
Much has been made of the obvious typo in the line, “For a hug, as I shink, my.” The word is obviously “shrink.” Pop had shrunk to the size of a watermelon seed a few lines earlier, and now the speaker shrinks as he realizes how much smaller he is than Pop.
It is quite possible that in the last line “know” is an additional typo, for the word “now” would be more appropriate. It would be nonsensical for the speaker to say he knows Pop is laughing when he is right there looking into his face. But it makes sense for him to report that during the hug Pop also begins to laugh.
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