It Might Injure the Brain

That is no country for old men. I went to see Gerald Stern & Garrett Hongo read together in Paterson. After hearing both poets, I approached Hongo—who, as Director of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon, was well spoken of as a teacher—to ask him how many drafts he'd gone through on a famous volcano poem. He launched into an explanation that he wrote intuitively, at the right moment, that there was no drafting in the way he worked. "I guess I'm from a different tradition," I said, wanting to explain my question. "I first learned about writing poems after reading a lot of parody, poets like Lewis Carroll..." He cut me off. "Parodies are vampires that suck the marrow out of dead poems!" Okie-dokie.

At that moment, an open reading was announced. I took my seat, still pondering Hongo's crack about parody. When my turn came, I stood, said "I'd like to do this one for Garrett," & recited my "Prelude" poem. It starts "Walking, talking in a widening sphere of influence..."

PRELUDE

Walking, talking in a widening
sphere of influence, the speaker
cannot hear his critics. His makeshift
binding breaks & sends a pageful
of mistakes spiraling to the
cluttered floor.

His metaphors extend no
more. The worst lines full of
obvious cliché. The rest as
easily explained away.

Workmen seeing him blindly
walk & read, & hailed him the last
of a dying breed. A dying breed!
No sooner was this heard than a mass-
produced image of a sea-white
bird, its quizzical expression,
can be seen from out of
National Geographic magazine.

     Perched on a line
     between the shapes
          of cars, it roosts
          above emptiness —

His poem stars his Self.
Maintaining, though, a cold mystique
he slouches toward the podium to speak.

Now I don't know if you'd call this parody exactly. To fully follow mine, you've got to recognize the presence of another text, a heavily anthologized text. My poem leans a lot on "The Second Coming" by Yeats. Most readers of 20th Century English poetry will know the poem about a falcon & a turning gyre, but the falcon here is "yours truly," a portrait of myself as a young poet. The turning gyre becomes the whole poetry game. Yeats sums up the decline of the aristocratic classes & the rise of chaos ("the best lack all convictions, while the worst / are full of passionate intensity.") In my poem, I focus only on the weaknesses & "the rest" of my own writing. You couldn't get more solipsistic.

I was less interested in mockery than in using the familiar poem in an unfamiliar way. Reading "The Second Coming," I'd caught a distorted glimpse of a serious question; doesn't every wannabe laureate at some time or other identify with the slouching Beast? Something about this double helix vision amused me. So I used Yeats to draw a self-mocking portrait of my own seriousness.

I had just got to Bethlehem, so to speak, when Hongo started screaming, "You're wasting your ear! You're wasting your ear!" – there in front of the audience. Not that I was doing Yeats a disservice, or sucking the marrow from his dead poem, whatever that means. Not that I had written something less than 100% USDA grade in its originality. It upset him that I was wasting my ear. People came up to offer their condolences, after the fact, presumably for my ear. Gerald Stern brushed by me to mutter, sotto voce, "I liked it." Lucky, lucky Mike.

Even now I wonder about this. I do not take Garrett Hongo for an idiot, anymore than I take him for a wise man. His exclamation reveals much, though, about what is taught in Creative Writing programs, not to mention the poet's marketplace at large. The writing of parody is outré. Outcast. Almost criminal.

Why? What was the nature of my crime?

Not copyright infringement. My source is a poem in public domain, but even if it were not, no one can really believe I'm trying to pass off the Yeats poem as my own work. None of the lines are taken word for word. Not lack of originality, either. A million English majors might parse "The Second Coming" without arriving at this exact response. In fact, the original is in free verse, while if you listened to my poem being read you'd take it for rhymed couplets. The poem is changed, changed utterly. Jokes have been made about slouching hither & thither, but there's a new trick here, or at least one I'd never seen. The inspiration to write a poem carries with it an individuality from the poet's experience, an epithelial graft, a trace of DNA, & my experience just happened to be a literary one. I'm not afraid to admit I've read some poetry, & liked it. Besides, one can strive too hard for originality, ending up like an MP3 download of every other desperate original.

I may be wasting my ear, but I am not likely to cause any damage to anyone's reputation. Remember Charles Caleb Colton's epigram: "Imitation is the sincerest of flattery." I thought highly enough of a poem to play with it; that's where all parodies start, in the droll cut & paste shops of the heart. There's a subversive side to the flattery here, but the joke is not on William Butler Yeats. It would be easy enough to make fun of Yeats, to mock his occultism, his intensely personal symbols. For Lease: one tower, elevated. Incense & tarot cards inc. But that certainly wouldn't be this poem.

Parody imitates. That's a given, yes, but there's something else. Always, leavened in the bread, parody embodies some inherent criticism. The parodist may indeed be mocking the pretensions of the host poet, but the cutting edge is not limited to that target alone. As in the Emperor's New Clothes, a good spoof unmasks everyone who ever treated a famous poem with kid gloves or deferred to a reputation. Do you quote the blurbs of books you've never read? Do you automatically accept the choices of whatever pundit's editing this year's Best anthology? Are you afraid of poetry? Then the joke's on you, friend.

Parody is a creative response to the multicultural poetry complex, from partisan magazines to prejudicial book distributors, from the grant system to fixed manuscript contests, from the practice of reciprocal reviewing to the self-aggrandizement of creative writing franchises. If parody's subversive about anything, it's the literary status quo. How can poetry have gotten so far from its source in wordplay? While the High Rollers of the Poetry Game downplay too much playfulness, parody takes it right back to its populist roots.

Think back to the first poem you ever knew by heart.

The first poem I knew was Lewis Carroll's "Father William." Remember that one? Alice was obliged at the Caterpillar's request to recite a classroom standard, in order to test how much she had changed since that morning. Any reader of Carroll's time would've recognized "The Old Man's Comforts & How He Gained Them," a morally uplifting ballad by Robert Southey, the poet laureate (1813-1843) just before William Wordsworth. The poem is a lesson to the young to live moderately, providentially, & reverently.

You are old, Father William, the young man cried,
The few locks which are left you are grey;
You are hale, Father William, a hearty old man,
Now tell me the reason I pray.

In the days of my youth, Father William replied,
I remember'd that youth would fly fast,
And abused not my health & my vigour at first
That I never might need them at last.

Only Alice spits out something else.

"You are old, father William," the young man said,
    "& your hair has become very white;
& yet you incessantly stand on your head --
    Do you think, at your age, it is right?"

"In my youth," father William replied to his son,
    "I feared it would injure the brain;
But now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
    Why, I do it again & again."

This is not merely a bit of nonsense. It's nonsense alright, but not merely a bit. Notice that the Old Man incessantly assumes an unnatural position, the reverse, in fact, of any rational stance. He's not merely clownish; he's topsy-turvy, as anyone who really expected children to embrace the lessons of the Southey poem must be. In response, the Old Man says, it's okay, I'm brainless, too. To conform to the conventional idea of proper behavior, as each episode of the poem presents it, is brainless. The fool is not Father William or the inquisitive youth; it's the society that expects you to obey without question whatever customs, rules, beliefs, or other heirlooms are handed down to you. Essentially, the whole Victorian lesson plan is rewritten as "go stand on your head. Why? Because I said so."

Southey's poem would be completely forgotten today, if Carroll hadn't messed with it. You knew I was going to say that, didn't you? Why? Because "Father William" is fun. Because readers continue to love it, & no critical reassessment or linguistic deconstruction of its signs & signifiers will significantly alter that fact. The audience for poetry hasn't gone away. The way we define poetry, however, whether that be as post-modern doctrine or ethnical diversity or therapeutic confession or whatever, simply forgets the fun factor. Fun, people. If poetry were fun again, why, then people would read it.

So always carry a garland of garlic to ward off parodic vampires, if you will, but I will continue to waste my ear. The marrow of dead poems keeps it sharp.

© Mike Alexander