Please attempt to have your poem posted for workshop in the Workshop section by this Saturday, May 25th. If you have any trouble posting to the Workshop section, go ahead and post it in the comments here. Please include your name with the working title of your poem. I am not going to designate a specific person from this class to post on assigned days since we all create at different paces. Even if you don't have something to be workshopped by Saturday, please post the notes you've come up with, etc. Sometimes just seeing the inner workings is enough to allow me and/or your fellow classmates to ask the kind of questions that ignites the kind of writing you hope to do.
Now, let's get started!
WEEK ONE
When it comes to humor, would you say you're The Munsters or The Addams
Family? Do you enjoy the kind of humor that is easily identified and
slapstick, or the kind that festers beneath your skin - confuses you a
little, maybe, challenges you to laugh in a way that makes you feel
guilty that you laughed at all. I am of the Addams Family lineage - my
kind of humor has long teeth that sink in, and my favorite poems with
humor always have a thin, underlying sorrow that carves out small
ditches between each line that we crawl into.
Consider the times you have mistakenly blurted out inappropriate humor, how your instincts kicked in and made you laugh instead of cry. Have you ever found yourself apologizing, saying, "I have no idea why I laughed. I'm sorry. I just...I wasn't expecting that."
There are jokes I have made in the face of violence or oppression or nervousness that I still do not forgive myself for. Shakespearian lecturer Ian Johnston writes (of comedy and tragedy) : “...the comic vision is easier to explain, since it corresponds to the way most of us think (or like to think) about life... Often an important point in the comedy is the way in which the main characters have to learn some important things about life... In a sense, the comic confusion will often force the individual to encounter things he or she has taken for granted, and dealing with these may well test many different resources (above all faith, flexibility, perseverance, and trust in other people)...
Tragedy,
by contrast, explores something much more complex: the individual's
sense of his own desire to confront the world on his own terms, to get
the world to answer to his conceptions of himself, if necessary at the
expense of customary social bonds and even of his own life. . . In that
sense, tragic heroes are passionately egocentric and unwilling to
compromise their powerful sense of their own identity in the face of
unwelcome facts.”
Read the poems below, then follow the prompt.WEEK ONE READING:
Hal Sirowitz
Crumbs
Don’t eat any food in your room,
Mother said. You’ll get more bugs.
They depend on people like you.
Otherwise, they would starve.
But who do you want to make happy,
your mother or a bunch of ants?
What have they done for you?
Nothing. They have no feelings.
They’ll eat your candy. Yet
you treat them better than you treat me.
You keep feeding them.
But you never offer me anything.
Girlfriend Over for Dinner
She’s very pretty, Mother said,
but she’s going to leave you.
She was talking about the future
& you weren’t in it, so I asked her
to tell me about it again, just in case
she made a mistake & left you out,
but you weren’t in the second version either.
She talked about going away to school,
& when I asked her what she was planning
to bring with her, she talked about her coat,
her boots, but she never mentioned you.
She says she’s very fond of you, but people
say that about puppies they’re about to give away.
Spying Instructions
Go downstairs to the den, Mother said,
& tell me what your sister & her boyfriend are doing.
If they’re necking, I want to know. And if they’re not kissing,
I need to know what they’re arguing about. If you
get caught, don’t tell her that I told you
to do it. Just tell her that you had to use the bathroom
downstairs, because I was in the one upstair, & that you
stopped to listen because you’re curious to know what it’ll be
like when you get older. The worst that can happen is that
she’ll punch you, & that’ll give me an excuse to go downstairs
& yell at her for hurting you, & find out for myself why
those two have been down there for so long.
Before You Were Born
I hope you’re not one of those sons,
Mother said, who as soon as he leaves
the house, forgets that he has a mother.
And if I give you a kick every now & then
to keep you in line, just remember that
when I was pregnant with you, it was you
who kicked me first. I’d eat two ice creams
for dessert, one for me, the other for you,
but instead of swallowing it, like a normal fetus
should do, you just kept your mouth shut.
And when I went to see the obstetrician, &
he told me that I was gaining too much weight,
& had to watch my diet, I tried to eat
nothing, but then you’d start to kick.
And I couldn’t wait for you to be born,
so I could smack you & get you back.
A Year Younger
If you don’t do your chores,
Mother said, I won’t let you
have a birthday party, & instead
of being nine, you’ll be eight
for another year, & none of your
friends will want to play with someone
younger than them, & the school will leave you back,
& you’ll have to repeat the same boring classes,
& while everyone is getting older, you’ll
be staying the same, & you’ll never
be able to catch up with them,
since you can’t have two birthdays
in one year, because we couldn’t
afford to buy you two presents.
Thieves Among Us
Don’t count the money in your wallet,
Mother said, while someone is looking.
It might give him ideas. He’ll want to steal it.
People are bad enough by themselves. They
don’t need you to encourage them to act even worse.
You should know how much you have before you leave
the house. And you shouldn’t carry a lot of change
in your pocket, because it’ll make noise,
& someone will think you are rich, & he’ll
want to rob you. And if he steals from you,
then he’s stealing from me, since I’ll have to replace it.
Jennifer L. Knox
Chicken Bucket
Today I turn thirteen and quit the 4-H club for good.
I smoke way too much pot for that shit.
Besides, Mama lost the rabbit and both legs
from the hip down in Vegas.
What am I supposed to do? Pretend to have a rabbit?
Bring an empty cage to the fair and say,
His name’s REO Speedwagon and he weighs eight pounds?
My teacher, Mr. Ortiz says, I’ll miss you, Cassie,
then he gives me a dime of free crank and we have sex.
I do up the crank with Mama and her boyfriend, Rick.
She throws me the keys to her wheelchair and says,
Baby, go get us a chicken bucket.
So I go and get us a chicken bucket.
On the way back to the trailer, I stop at Hardy’s liquor store.
I don’t want to look like a dork
carrying a chicken bucket into the store—
and even though Mama always says
Never leave chicken where someone could steal it—
I wrap my jacket around it and hide it
under the wheelchair in the parking lot.
I’ve got a fake ID says my name’s Sherry and I’m 22,
so I pick up a gallon of Montezuma Tequila,
a box of Whip-Its and four pornos.
Mama says, That Jerry Butler’s got a real wide dick.
But the whole time I’m in line, I’m thinking,
Please God let the chicken bucket be OK.
Please God let the chicken bucket be OK.
Please God let the chicken bucket be OK.
The guy behind me’s wearing a T-shirt
that says, Mustache Rides 10¢.
So I say, All I got’s a nickel.
He says, You’re cute,
so we go out to his van and have sex.
His dick’s OK, but I’ve seen wider.
We drink most of the tequila and I ask him,
Want a Whip-It?
He says, Fuck no—that shit rots your brain.
And when he says that, I feel kind of stupid
doing another one. But then I remember
what mama always told me:
Baby be your own person.
Well fuck yes.
So I do another Whip-It,
all by myself and it is great.
Suddenly it hits me—Oh shit! the chicken bucket!
Sure enough, it’s gone.
Mama’s going to kill me.
Those motherfuckers even took my jacket.
I can’t buy a new chicken bucket
because I spent all the money at Hardy’s.
So I go back to the trailer, crouch outside
behind a bush, do all the Whip-Its,
puke on myself, roll in the dirt,
and throw open the screen door like a big empty wind.
Mama! Some Mexicans jumped me!
They got the chicken bucket,
plus the rest of the money!
I look around the trailer.
Someone’s taken all my old stuffed animals
and Barbies and torn them to pieces.
Fluff and arms and heads are all over the place.
I say someone did it,
but the only person around is Rick.
Mama is nowhere to be seen.
He cracks open another beer and says,
What chicken bucket?
Well, that was a long a time ago.
Rick and I got married
and we live in a trailer in Boron.
We don’t live in a trailer park though—
in fact there’s not another house around
for miles. But the baby keeps me
company. Rick says I’m becoming
quite a woman, and he’s going to let Mama know that
if we ever see her again.
Pimp My Ride
Probability, like time, is its own dimension.
The ’86 Chevy Suburban laced by rust,
pocked with bird poop, antenna wiggling
in its Bondo-clogged hole is only one way
the story begins. In another, we never
bought the blue behemoth—we bought
a ’63 Oldsmobile from a lady named Dolores.
In another, Dolores drove into a tree before we
were ever even born; in another, we owned a house
with a garage that kept the rain off, the rust out,
and the paint nice; in another, it was all mine,
we’d never met; in another, yours and someone else’s.
Likewise after the ride is pimped—metallic flames
in red and pink unzipping across its sparkly black
body, blitz of chrome, titanium woofers, enough
silver satin inside to line nine caskets—this
is only one story: another’s bright white
and blinds like an elephant made of sunspots;
another’s plantain-green and full of gold;
another’s purple with a sink in the back,
where we’re arguing; in the back of another, high
and high-fiving; in another, going at it
like two teens made of monster truck tires.
I Wish My Brother George Was Here
This is a true story: At 64, Liberace
paid to have his 17 year-old lover’s face
surgically altered to look just like Liberace’s
17 year-old face so when Liberace was fucking
his young lover he was fucking himself,
the younger self with two names, the Wladziu
from Milwaukee self, a self destined to be known and adored
at arm’s length by millions, but before the sequined self,
there was the prodigy self, one of three children, a dreamy-
eyed self, at once naive yet intimately
familiar with lonely Wisconsin winters.
Bonus:
Footage of Sirowitz reading his poems (because his actual live voice is as important to the poems as the writing itself) :
PROMPT:
This week, writers, I challenge you to allow space for the absurd or a
comical element of a story to find its way into a poem. We have been
trained to believe that only severity and struggle are respectable forms
of poetry, that a poem with humor is not sophisticated enough to be "a
real poem." We are expected to only tell our stories a specific kind of
way. But most of us recite anecdotes to our friends and family in ways
that we don't present in our writing. We have been shamed into believing
humor has no place in poetry. But isn't poetry itself a form of
escapism? Is it not language drawn to confront what we cannot? Humor is
another form of life raft. It keeps us afloat, it helps us derail the
heavy stuff in a way that is manageable. Why have I never written about
my dad diving his fist into the salad bar and throwing a handful of
cherry tomatoes at the bigoted waitress? Why can’t all of us figure out
how to allow our joy and sorrow and shame to coexist in the same stanza
like Regie Cabico?!?! (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3FY6FYTOEh0)
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