Bad Poetry

Posted by Ace on November 22nd, 2008 filed in Tales of the Interregnum

Long, long ago [more than six years ;) ], in the Time of Legends, I was the Vice-President of my college’s English Club.

This was not a inherently heroic position.  I did not win it by destroying all comers at a poetry slam (actually, I don’t think the term poetry slam had been invented yet), or by challenging the existing Vice President to short-form literature at fifty paces.  It was conferred upon me because the staff of the college English Club was synonymous with the staff of the college literary magazine, Vitae, and the year before I had volunteered to join the staff of Vitae, at a time when that staff consisted of exactly two people.  One of them, a tall, thin, soft-spoken guy with dark eyes and dark hair, was the President.  The other, a short, passionate, beautifully urban Spanish girl (the term Spanish hadn’t been invented then either) was the Vice President.  She, unbeknownst to me, was scheduled to replace him the following year, the year in question.  So that year, when I showed up for the first meeting (late), she, as the new President, introduced me to the handful of newcomers as the Vice President.  And I, being an articulate sort, said to them:  “Hey.”  (The guy who had been the old President was not only gone, but dead.  And yes, I also became the President in my own time.  Separate story, on both counts.)

After the initial shock, I immediately set about making the Vice Presidency a heroic position, as best I knew how.  I wrote a lot (much of it awful), and critiqued a lot (much of it level), and drew fliers for our various events with artwork that wasn’t very good, but was the best I was capable of producing at the time.  I also talked us up as a force on every occasion I was able (of which there were not too many) to anyone who would listen (who counted few).  And I took myself very seriously, which I was prone to do anyway, although not so godawfully seriously that I was unable to occasionally poke fun at the entire affair, as I did when I wrote for my fellows a brilliant piece simply entitled “Bad Poetry”.  It read as follows:

My girlfriend left me.

My girlfriend left me.

My girlfriend left me.

My girlfriend left me.

My girlfriend left me.

My girlfriend left me.

My girlfriend left me.

My girlfriend left me.

I love my girlfriend.

I hate my girlfriend.

I killed my girlfriend.

I ate my girlfriend.

I’m watching TV now.

The Smurfs are on.

Smurfette’s lookin’ good.

99 Smurfs and just one Smurfette.

Think about it.

—

Also in that same year, I had a Creative Writing class.  It was the first Creative Writing class I had ever taken, and it was largely as I had concluded it was likely to be during my initial consideration of it.  The teacher was a proper, sensible woman who wore skirts and jackets and scarves with brooches, and seemed like a transplant from some enclave of intelligentsia up in the Realm of Maples;  old enough to be mature, young enough to be attractive, and pleasant and insightful either way.  The students ran the gamut of all types- normal people, by and large, none of them bookish at a glance.  Some of them were good writers out of the box:  they were there because they wrote all the time anyway, and the critique would give them insights into their pieces they were too close to see.  You didn’t always like what they were writing about, but you knew it would hold your attention.  Others were halfway decent:  people who had occasional flashes of competency, or who had a lot of potential, but hadn’t yet figured out a way to put it all together that would resonate with others.  Still others were hopeless (or so I thought then):  people who lacked both the level of perception or presence to ever say anything interesting, and the humility to learn how.  There was one group of four girls who fell in particular into that last category, girls who caused me a continual low level of annoyance throughout the semestre.  They were sociable with each other and with no-one else, and they had the feel of a clique of Mean Girls right out of high school–  the kind of girls who did calisthenic routines in front of construction paper backdrops in the “Student Athletic Association” their Senior year,  because they weren’t pretty enough to be cheerleaders or talented enough to get a part in the School Play.  They accused me of using big words in my writing just to make myself sound smarter, which made me angry, so I used even bigger words that I knew they wouldn’t understand whenever I could, just to piss them off (which did).  I would tell you what sorts of things they wrote in the class, but I can’t remember any of them.

Except for one…

One night the session was transferred to a different classroom, in a different building than we normally met in.  It was windy and icy outside, winter-dark and bitter.  The radiators in the classroom we’d been transferred to didn’t work right, so the room was cold, cold as a meat-locker, cold even for me, who loved the cold and had the fire of being under 20 to keep me warm.  I was wearing an olive-drab army vest with no sleeves over a t-shirt with no sleeves, and jeans, and a brown wide-brimmed hat that wanted to be a cowboy hat but looked more a 70’s pimp’s hat, or maybe a Mountie’s.  I had gotten less than three hours sleep in the previous forty-eight, and had had nothing to eat or drink for the entire day save Coca-Cola, which for the first time ever had started to make its presence felt not with a lightness of limb and a familiar burn on my cheeks, but with a slow, painful sizzling in the pit of my stomach.  And outside of my classes, I had spent this time of privation doing nothing except go over submissions to Vitae, nearly all of which were bad, with a uniformity that utterly boggled my mind.  So I was not really in what could be properly described as a receptive state of consciousness.  Quite the opposite–  I loped into the classroom, crammed myself into the fiberglass and steel construction of my seat, slouched down as far as I was able to do so and pulled the brim of my hat down over my eyes so I wouldn’t have to make eye contact with anyone.  Then I wrapped my hands around my upper arms to preserve them against the chill and reclined there, projecting evil and listening to the evening’s readings with disinterest.

It was under these circumstances that the Littlest Mean Girl read her poem.

The Littlest Mean Girl’s name was Joanna Mignola.  Out of the four Mean Girls, she was the most agreeable (which is to say, she smiled occasionally and said the least), and probably the most talented:  a gradation of fine degree, but still counting for something nonetheless.  Her poem was called “Under the Gun”.  It was a substance abuse poem, a type of poem for which I reserved special ire–  only without any references within it that would provide the listener with an understanding of what type of substance was being abused, or in what fashion.  I have spent many nights drinking trying to exorcise it from my head, a pursuit at which I have been mostly successful, but I still remember enough of its general tone and timbre to recount the following stanza, which is evocative of its general effect:

Don’t you know you’re killing yourself with that stuff

Can’t you see that you’re

Under the gun.

I remained in my cross-armed no-eye-contact slouchy position throughout her recitation, mentally la-la-la-ing, wishing the hell that the class would just be over, but confident at least that if the class couldn’t be over, then at least when she was finished she would get the lambasting she so richly deserved.  Imagine my consternation then when she completed reading it, and received not a roomful of blank stares, nor a round chorus of raspberries, but compliments from the other students on how much they enjoyed it!

Have I slipped across the d-barrier again? I questioned myself, inwardly.  I lifted my head ever so slightly, just enough to raise the brim of my hat out of the way of my eyeline.  The first group students, the good writers, were all sitting there uncomfortably, staring at their papers, lips pressed together primly.  No, I realized.  They’re thinkin’ the same thing.  They’re just not going to say anything.  So much for “critique”. I lowered my head again, gripped my upper arms tighter.  Fuck it.  What do I care?  Let her think she’s Erica Jong.  I’m not gonna say anything.

“…and I just love how personal it is, you know, the sensation of your intimacy with the person you’re writing about…”

You KNOW it sucks, said the Voice.  (Yes, there was a Voice, even way back then.)

I’m NOT gonna say anything.

“…and how it isn’t so complicated that it distracts you from the emotion…”

It’s your job.  That’s what you DO.

I am NOT gonna SAY anything.

“…Well I made it that way because I wanted the reader to be able to bring their own experience to it…”

It’s your JOB.

Then a pause, the flow of compliments dried up at last, and the teacher picked her papers up and tapped them all on the desk to align them.  “Does anyone have any other questions?” she asked, looking around at us.

I am NOT GOING TO SAY ANYTHING.

Silence, and a heartbeat, and another…

Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhh YES I AM.

“Yeah,” I said, sharp and clear as a bell in that cold silence-  and I reached up with my right hand, and I TOOK OFF MY HAT.

“I got a couple a’ questions,” I told her.

The particulars of what happened next are variably recounted, and differ in emphasis depending on who you get the story from.  But generally the thing that all of the accounts agree upon is that for the next 20 minutes, I proceeded to tear poor little Joanna Mignola and her crappy poem a new asshole, with a vehemence that started out surgically precise and gradually degenerated into babbling and raving.  Her statement of approach to the work, roughly summarized, was that she had chosen to avoid making the piece too specific in its details, because she desired to allow the reader to bring the benefit of their own experience and interpretation to it.  My counter-point was that any piece that remained that general was ceding the responsibility of the writer to the reader, and thus had nothing to recommend it.  And that the point of being a writer was to have a distinctive voice, and to use specific detail to speak with authority about Truths, in order that those Truths might resonate with the reader’s own, to their benefit.  Which was a very different proposition.  I was nowhere near that eloquent, however.  I used phrases like “I read a thousand of these a day, and they all suck,” and, “Poems without specific detail are literary lint.”  And eventually, as the faces of the First-groupers went white with horror, and the scowls of the Mean Girls built up on their faces like thunderheads, I just collapsed in a convulsive, sweating heap, writhing back and forth with hellish beams of green light shining from my eyes, screaming, “BAD!!…  POETRY!!…  BAAAAAAAAAAAAD!!!”

The teacher called a 15 minute break.  The Mean Girls stamped out into the hallway, none too quietly, and the First-groupers ringed around me, either in awe or in shock, or both.  “They’re going to kill you,” said one of them, evenly.  And it certainly looked as if she was right–  I could see their stretched shadows through the classroom doorway, dancing on the green cinder block wall outside, eerily evocative of a 1940s horror movie.

“I’m right,” I told her, grinning fiercely.  “You know I’m right.”

“Yes,” she conceded, nodding her head.  “I know.  But there are ways of communicating it that are more…”  She waved her arms in small circles, helplessly.  …Diplomatic.”

When the break was over the Mean Girls filed back into class and sat elbow to elbow, like a war tribunal.  They explained, rising to the occasion with an eloquence they rarely possessed (and without ever referring to me by name or looking me in the eye) that they thought that I sucked, and that I was way out of line, and that I had no right to say any of the terrible things that I had said about Joanna’s poem, or anyone else’s writing for that matter.  And then they sat there, glowering.  The mood in the room was so rancid, that for the first time not only in that class, but in the entire professional career of the teacher, she ended the class early, canceling the rest of our session, and sent everyone home early.

—

Now, the reasons I bring these events up are very simple.  For one, they’re still remembered, not only by me, but by all the people who knew me during that time period, and are still recounted to others who haven’t heard about them when the subject of my history comes up.  The girl who flatly told me that the Mean Girls were going to kill me went on to become one of my friends;  I had a green tea latte with her the other day, and one of the first things she mentioned when we saw each other was that Darwin and her were telling somebody who’d heard of me but never met me all about it.  Funny coincidence, as not a week and a half before that, I had told Kaygee at work about it myself, wandering through Sinotown, in the streets of the City of Mists.

But for another:  most of the people who know the story are not aware that after I had graduated from the college, Joanna Mignola went on to become a member of the staff of Vitae and the English Club, just like I had before her.  And what I wonder now is:  does she remember it?  And did it ever make any difference?  Did her writing get better?  Was it The Thing That Made Her Swear To Be a Writer Forever?  Or the Thing She Never Recovered From That Ultimately Made Her Give Up Writing?  And does she look back on it now and laugh?  Or does she still think of me as an asshole?–  imagine that I’m out there somewhere, full of my own self-importance, deriding and destroying the self-esteem and precious creative works of other would-be creators, for my own diabolical amusement?

I’m not sure I really want to know.