When
I was in college, a friend suggested that I take a poetry-writing workshop.
Having tired of all the Derrida and Judith Butler I was being forced to read, I
figured a creative writing class would be kind of fun. And more importantly,
that it would be an easy "A."
Also,
I did have some experience writing poetry.
Two
years earlier, I'd been responsible for a whole notebook of verse that clearly
was written by a freshman taking “Intro to Existentialism” and for whom the
works of both Nine Inch Nails and Sylvia Plath had been very, very important in
her earlier, formative years.
"Death
at my door," began one knee-slapper. "And I shout, 'Come on
in!'"
Really,
really bad stuff. At the time, of course, I thought it was really, really good.
Cameron,
the professor who taught the seminar, eschewed all things canonical and adored
all things modern. As a result, we ended up reading a lot of poetry that
didn't really say much but was kind of cool to look at, composed as it was from
random, weird words (mostly nouns), inexplicably bisected by parentheses, with
lots of back- and forward slashes and colons thrown in for postmodern panache:
ly/sis:
: cannot/
the
(dro)sera
This
head scratcher was the poem (the entire poem) that Cameron handed out the first
day of class.
"And
what do we think of this?" he asked.
"I
don't know," I volunteered hesitantly. "It seems like a literary
'Hooked on Phonics' to me."
Several
people laughed and Cameron shot me a withering look.
"It's
easy to dismiss. It's not 'pretty.' But it's about seeing beyond straight rhyme
and rhythm. It's full of contextual possibilities."
So's
the toilet after grandma eats a bag of dried apricots, I
thought sourly.
It
was a harbinger of things to come.
The
only student in the workshop who was any good was a quiet girl named Megan with
whom I later became friends.
When
Megan would have to read, her face would turn nearly purple and her hands would
shake from nervousness. Her stuff was subtle, disturbing and insanely complex
for someone so young. I still remember whole lines, it was that good.
Based
purely on phenomenal writing chops, she should be famous right now except no
one, myself included, really gives a shit about modern poetry. And besides,
none of her poetry contained deliberately abstruse postmodern shtick.
Cameron
gave Megan "A's" though. He had to. She was too good
for him not to but you could tell that they were grudgingly meted out. Her
poetry insulted his sensibility.
It
actually made sense.
Unlike
Paul's. His mid-semester masterpiece “GO/n:Ad” dealt with "o/nion::
vegetable (for)mica/tritan(op)ia." He explained to the class that it was
about insomnia, circumcision and black hole theory as well as corporate greed
in America.
Since
no one knew what "tritanopia" meant and Paul had cleverly bisected it
with parentheses, he got an "A."
"I
like it," said Cameron slowly. "It's a little...rough around the
edges, but there's a certain 'found object' quality to it that I think
works."
Then
there was Katie, whose poetry revolved entirely around her boyfriend Josh whom
she "loved like a star that rides through the night to my
heart."
I
actually kind of liked Katie. She was sweet and dumb and pretty in that ripe,
voluptuous, just short of porky way you know is going to turn into full-fledged
obesity a couple years down the line. Every day after class, Katie would call
Josh on the pink cell phone that featured Enrique Iglesias’ “Hero” as his ring
tone.
Cameron
hated her poetry, of course. Not only because it was sidesplittingly funny
("Hold me, Hold me, Hold me now/Under the sky"), but also because it
always rhymed: "Your mouth tasted like cotton candy/That night on the
beach so sandy.”
Katie
often sat next to me and made no effort to hide the many lip gloss applications
that were performed during discussions of, say, silence as textual space. She
wrote in big, puffy, girlish script in a Hello Kitty notebook. Sometimes,
she'd scrawl notes as Cameron rambled on about phonological signifiers and push
them over to me.
"I
think Billy just farted," read one. "LOL!!!"
Jenna,
another girl in the class, I didn't like. Her poetry revolved
around anal sex. And witchcraft. And anal sex. Sometimes, cum. But always anal
sex.
Once
she wrote a poem called "Ch:lamy/dia." It was about chlamydia,
pyromania and her perennial favorite, anal sex. And witchcraft.
Witch,
I re/fuse to k(iss) your: bitters!
the
itch/not just the f(ire)
but
your: c/ock
in
my a(s)s
Nothing
was too revealing for old Jenna.
"t(it)ubatio/n::
Your
cum in my mouth/
Cock
in my As/S:
C(ock):
C/ock"
went
one.
Although
Jenna wasn't particularly attractive, whenever she would read the guys in
class, some of whom had probably never had their cocks in anyone's mouth or
anal cavity or, for that matter, vagina would sit at rapt attention.
I'm
not making this verse up. You see, I saved Jenna's final project. Because her
final class project "AdAM:) aN:tine/ CuM (H)ere" is one of the most
satisfying comedic reads I've ever experienced. And it's held up well. I still
almost pee myself laughing when I read it.
Although
Cameron was one of the most pretentious motherfuckers on the planet, he was
also one of the biggest closet sleazes.
Jenna
always got "A's."
"Visceral,"
he remarked one day after she had read yet another poem about yet another
"C(ock) c/ock :cocK" ramming into her "a/Ss a/ss (A)ss.
Jenna
smiled at Cameron.
Cameron
smiled back.
If
I play my cards right, you could see him thinking, Maybe I can ram
my C(ock) into her a/ss. Who cares about the ch:lamy/dia?
Then
there was Ron who, either like me, thought it was an easy credit or that a
poetry writing workshop meant a lot of fast–and-loose artsy pussy. With a
scary ardor, he hit on every girl in class and wrote a lot of stuff about
horses and dogs. Apparently, the untimely passing away of Cody, the mixed breed
German Shepherd he'd had when he was ten, was one of the most profound
influences on his life: "The furry body shuffled out/And I knew he was no
more."
Near
the end of the semester, Cameron announced to the class that our final project
would be a portfolio, containing no less than fifteen poems.
Ron
and I exchanged worried glances.
Fuck,
we both said with our eyes. This was supposed to be an easy
"A".
Sure,
outside this classroom Ron was probably a date rapist but in here, he was the
closest thing to a comrade that I had. Because like me, he was at least smart
enough to know that his poetry sucked balls.
Later
in the student union, as I played Velocita!, a weird Italian race car game
that was located next to the janitor's break room, Ron cornered me.
"What
are you gonna do for this project?" he demanded.
"I
don't know," I replied, swerving to avoid the polizia.
I
had no idea what this game was doing there, in a communal space intended for
students who almost without exception looked like “Mean Preppy #1” from a John
Hughes movie, but I loved it and played it every day between classes.
"I
may copy down the ingredients from a ketchup bottle and throw in some back
slashes and colons."
I
really wasn't kidding.
“This
fucking sucks,” he sighed. “Cameron told me that 'Last Day of Cody' was
'puerile.'"
He
brooded for a second.
I
sped up. I was near the finish line.
"What's
'puerile' mean?" he muttered.
My
car flipped over a barrier.
"Facile
bersaglio!" taunted the game.
"Fuck!"
I yelled.
Before
Ron had distracted me, I'd been close to getting the best score yet this week.
I
turned to him.
It
means he thinks you're a fucking idiot, I wanted to shout.
Instead,
I heaved a sigh.
"It
means you're gonna have to write something with lots of weird punctuation.
Throw in random words. Throw in big words. Just look through the
dictionary."
"Huh,"
he said, considering. "That's not a bad idea."
It
really wasn't, I thought later as I rode home on the bus.
As
the bus passed the Safeway, I saw a sign in the window. "Fresh Whole Split
Chicken Breasts," it read. I jotted that down in my notebook then crossed
out "chicken."
I
looked around and continued scribbling.
“Yolanda's
Hair Weave Central. Tenemos X-Box! Checks cashed here.”
Despite
the signs, my neighborhood, the only one I could afford even with all my
part-time jobs, was filled with faux-hipsters whose parents paid their rent but
were desperate to live near the members of Fugazi and to differentiate
themselves from their “Mean Preppy #1s” cousins, even if it meant displacing
poverty-stricken, elderly black and Latino folk.
I
added, "No spitting on curb," "We Accept Food Stamps," and
"Pollo y cerdo" to my list. And then, "Pupuseria de
Miguel."
I
scribbled in my notebook until my hand hurt. Then I added "my hand
hurts" in my notebook. When I got home, I went through the dictionary and
pulled big words that I thought sounded cool. Then I looked up
"erection" in my thesaurus and jotted down several high-end synonyms.
I
strung everything together and added some creative punctuation. When I was
done, it looked like this:
sin/ter
sin/ter (s)inter
Ten(emos)
x-bOX!
:like
the ecchymo(sis)::
di/lated
with (blood)
fresh
:wHolE s/plit: breasts
apotheo(sis)
yo(landa)'s
hair
(w)eave
cen/tral
en(gorged).
omma/tidium
No (sp)itting on /curb
tur/gid::
valv/ulit(is)
Pupu/seria
de Mi:guel
cashed here C/heck (s)
verm/iculite
poLLo
(y cer/do)
foo/d
st:amps we: acc(ept)
:h/and my
(hurts).
Using
my notebook and the dictionary, I did this fourteen more times. At the
beginning of the portfolio, I included an artistic "statement of
intent."
It
was, I wrote, a polemic against capitalistic greed predicated on consumer
consumption in the United States as well as an indictment of racial, sexual and
class segregation in low-income neighborhoods.
Then
I passed it in.
I
got an "A" on my project.
And
so did Ron.
