Waiting on Elvis, 1956 by Joyce Carol Oates

Waiting on Elvis, 1956

by Joyce Carol Oates

This place up in Charlotte called Chuck's where I

used to waitress and who came in one night

but Elvis and some of his friends before his concert

at the Arena, I was twenty-six married but still

waiting tables and we got to joking around like you

do, and he was fingering the lace edge of my slip

where it showed below my hemline and I hadn't even

seen it and I slapped at him a little saying, You

sure are one aren't you feeling my face burn but

he was the kind of boy even meanness turned sweet in

his mouth.

Smiled at me and said, Yeah honey, I guess I sure am.

This is Elvis' first LP; October 1956. Read about the recording of this album and see other photos here.

This persona poem was first published in Poetry in the October/November 1987 issue.

I told all my students when I was teaching in college/university: every poet should write an Elvis poem. I stand by it, although I think poems written by poets now, especially young poets, would be very different than ones that some of my students wrote 20-30 years ago.

(Disclosure: I have written a number of Elvis poems. Two are even in an Elvis-poetry anthology! This book currently retails on Amazon for almost $250!)

Joyce Carol Oates is, of course, known for her novels and short stories. She is a prolific author whose fiction topics are varied and vast. Like a lot of prose people, she occasionally tries her hand at poetry. Her poems are often persona poems, and this seems very natural, as novels are persona prose, are they not?

The voice in this poem is so clear. The lack of punctuation adds to the voice, and that voice makes the speaker not just relatable but recognizable. This poem seems as if someone were being interviewed--a former waitress being asked by a local news station, for a person-on-the-street segment, if she had ever met a famous person, for example--and this poem is her response. The language is colloquial and the pace frenetic, and the speaker feels like someone we all know--or someone like her.

Elvis was 21 in the autumn of 1956 and our server has told us she was 26. The crux of this narrative could have been any two young people--a diner and a server--flirting a little. But it is Elvis and he has been, since 1956, one of the people we Americans (and beyond) have wanted to know everything about.

One other thing I love about this poem is the last line. It is separated from the rest of the poem and it is the only place where a person other than the speaker talks. It is, of course, Elvis, and his 7 word response gives us a lot about the man at 21. He is a bit cheeky and full of himself, flirtatious and confident, seemingly already knowing he is not just A one but one of the few The ones. But there is also a bit of the humble--"I guess." Perhaps not so much humble as being brought up right--he tries to hide his brag in a bit of doubt.

Although this is a narrative poem in that it tells a story, it is also a lyric in that it focuses on a small and specific timeframe. Lyrics are often described as photographs of a moment, and this photo is very clear. The poet has set the scene and placed two people in it that we feel we know, in very different ways.

Here is the first paragraph of Oates' Wikipedia page: Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938)[1] is an American writer and conspiracy theorist [2]. Oates published her first book in 1963, and has since published 58 novels, a number of plays and novellas, and many volumes of short stories, poetry, and nonfiction. Her novels Black Water (1992), What I Lived For (1994), and Blonde (2000), and her short story collection Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories (2014) were each finalists for the Pulitzer Prize. She has won many awards for her writing, including the National Book Award for her novel Them (1969),[3] two O. Henry Awards, the National Humanities Medal, and the Jerusalem Prize (2019). *(If you are wondering what conspiracy theories Oates' subscribes to . . . it is just one, and it is one that many people of all political stripes are discussing--that the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, PA was a set-up or faked. If you want to start down this interwebs rabbit hole, here is a very recent article on the subject.)

Sunday's blog poet poem subject was Prince, another beloved icon who died young. Today it is Elvis. Might there be another poem about a singer on my mind for Sunday? Come back then and find out!