Nyla Matuk and I have a few things in common; we are both poets (in my case, after a fashion), and we both know what sumptuary laws are, she having written a book of poems using that term as its title. Me? I wrote a public policy paper comparing sales and excise taxes to such laws, which regulated the items that individuals could buy–down to the ribbons on their hatbands–according to their social class from ancient Greece to colonial America. (I’ll let you decide which work you’d prefer to curl up with by the fireside.)
Nyla Matuk
There, however, the resemblances end. She is a more-than-moderately bodacious woman, and I am the opposite of those two predicates. And she, according to a quote that keeps popping up in my Twitter feed on @AdviceToWriters, “strangely enough” had “some excellent high school English teachers” who taught her “to love poetry.”
That “strangely enough” is telling, because my experience in the American secondary–and primary!–education system was vastly different; through some unseen hand of lyrical fate, I was repeatedly placed under the tutelage of teachers who used poetry as punishment, if not outright torture. As a result I ought now to hate poetry the way a man exiled to the Russian gulag despises kasha (buckwheat porridge). That I don’t is, to borrow an overworked phrase, a triumph of the human spirit over the storm troopers of the poetry-industrial complex.
Gulag prisoners: “Ugh–more villanelles?”
My tale of woe begins in the third grade. A lay teacher at the Catholic school I attended instructed my class to write a poem as an English assignment. The next day, a majority–but by no means all–of the girls handed in their work, the laggards being potential candidates for adolescent rebellion, teen pregnancy and the County Home for Wayward and Depraved Women. Of the boys in the class, only one turned in a poem. Me.
King Herod: “Shut up and write me another poem!”
The teacher fumed at the mass disobedience and, in a sentence whose injustice rivaled King Herod’s massacre of the innocents, she ordered everyone–I repeat everyone–in the class to write a poem and turn it in the next day. Had there been a budding Clarence Darrow in the class he or she would have pointed out that the sentence was cruel, unusual, and overbroad; by requiring everyone to write a poem, she was punishing those of us who were not guilty, but she was so angry that no one–including me–dared brook her unreasoning penal code.
As the lone male poet in the class, I became the object of scorn, and worse. Our playground basketball goal was attached to a brick wall, with no inbounds room, making flagrant fouls on those driving in for a layup fraught, as they say, with peril. After a few instances of blunt trauma to the head that made me forget several of my favorite fractions, I limped inside to contemplate the unfairness of the world I lived in.
Christina Rossetti: “I wonder why there are no great basketball poems?”
There, I formed a resolution to retaliate against the teacher who refused to recognize the effort I’d put into the first poem in my life; I decided to steal someone else’s poem, thereby taking my first step on the road to poetic glory. As I would later learn, none other than T.S. Eliot had said “Good poets borrow, great poets steal.”
I pulled an anthology of poetry from the class library shelves, and flipped through it until I found a verse so simple it would not seem unusual for it to issue from the pen of a third-grader. The one I lit upon was “Who Has Seen the Wind?” by Christina Rossetti, whose first verse goes as follows:
Who has seen the wind?
Neither I nor you:
But when the leaves hang trembling,
The wind is passing through.
Using my poetic license learner’s permit, I transmuted this gem into a stone of lesser lustre:
Who has seen the wind?
Neither you nor me:
But when the wind is blowing,
The leaves shake on the tree.
When it came my turn to read this aloud, the teacher’s face screwed up into an expression of skeptical distaste, but her knowledge of poetry wasn’t so encyclopedic as to bring the object of my plagiarism quickly to her consciousness. Like a night rider through the prairie town I grew up in when it was located on the nation’s frontier a century before, she passed on.
Following that narrow escape from poetry incarceration I was free for a decade until my junior year in high school. As punishment for a class-wide violation of some breach of decorum that isn’t even a misdemeanor in most states, Miss Mitchell (wonder why she wasn’t married) imposed a sentence whose punitive aspect is still a model for ayatollahs around the world; memorize two hundred lines of poetry–over spring vacation!
“You have the right to remain silent. But you also have to recite 200 lines of poetry from memory so I’m not sure how you’re going to pull it off.”
And so I was frog-marched, so to speak, into the hell of poetry prison; force-fed iambic pentameter, and then compelled to regurgitate it upon my return to the states from the Bahamas, where my father had taken the family on a trip to celebrate the final payment of the promissory note he’d given to the seller of the ladies’ ready-to-wear store he’d bought in Sedalia, Missouri, widely known as the Paris of Central Missouri. As opposed to Paris, Missouri.
At some point I took on the character of a Quisling; that is, an exemplar of Vidkun Abraham Lauritz Jonnsøn Quisling, the Norwegian military officer and politician who nominally headed the government of Norway during the Nazi occupation during World War II, and whose name has become a byword for collaboration with an enemy. I suffered under the yoke of poetry, but it was getting to the point where I actually kinda sorta didn’t mind the stuff.
Quisling: “I . . . I’m kinda starting to like poetry.”
I didn’t read much of the stuff, and I didn’t write any except in jest, including a couplet I carved into my desk my senior year in high school, an ode to a homely sociology teacher named “Dorcas Doering” (pronounced “DEER-ing”), a couplet of which went as follows:
A Dorcas by any other name
would be much more en-doering.
In college I can recall writing only four lines of poetry, not on foolscap but on the wall of a library conference room where someone had left a stack of poetry chapbooks, presumably as sources for a heavily-footnoted term paper. The wall is still there, but the poem was painted over at some point, perhaps by the author of that paper who feared it would be discovered by some fearsome critic and included in an anthology, taking precedence over his, her or its work. It was not, so I reproduce it here:
Oh how I wish I could write like the Bard
So that I might win Yale’s Younger Poet Award.
After college, poetry would sometimes insinuate itself into my brain through external stimuli, such as the lapidary lines that I helpfully titled Thoughts on Waking After Spending the Night in a Kosher Vegetarian Commune. No deceptive advertising there, as you can see from the l’oeuvre its own bad self:
This is kosher, this is trayfe,
One unclean, the other safe.
All day long we work and slafe
Keeping kosher from the trayfe.
From time to time I would recall a line from Yeats or Auden that I’d read in freshman Humanities class in college. At one point I found myself deep within the stacks of a library in graduate school studying something other than poetry, and jotted down–on the wall next to my carrel–some lines of Yeats that I misattributed to Auden. When I returned to my favorite study spot the next day I found that someone had corrected my faulty memory with a critical graffito that dripped with contempt. I realized it was time to get serious about the stuff; poetry, like football, is a game that can’t be played at half-speed.
“Here I sit/All broken-hearted . . .”
The problem is that I’m no good at the serious kind of poetry, which has been in fashion for so long that it’s a wonder it hasn’t gone out of fashion. The poetry I wanted to write was the kind you saw on the Burma-Shave signs that dotted the highways of my youth. Deathless rhymes such as:
Burma-Shave was a brand of brushless shaving cream that became known for its advertising gimmick of posting humorous rhyming poems on small roadside signs. As Mom, Dad, Sis and Junior drove by in their De-Luxe Dyna-Flow sedan, the mystery of these poems would unfold in sequence, building suspense for the final line, which was also a punch-line of a joke.
Dinah Shore, checking the ID of an underage driver.
So instead of poring over Greek and Latin verse under the gimlet gaze of a pedophile professor in an English boarding school, I learned poetry on the open roads of the U-S-A–which Dinah Shore explored in her Chevrolet–free from gloomy critical theories and close attention to trochees and spondees. If my poetry suffers by comparison to those who benefitted from rigorous training in high-toned private prep schools of the sort depicted in the Robin Williams’ film Dead Poets Society, that’s okay by me.
Robin Williams in “Dead Poets Society.”
Because as my model Ogden Nash put it, “It’s better to be a good bad poet, than a bad good poet.”
Oh Con, it’s so hard to be the only sensitive male in the room.