An Article from Professor Mack

As anyone who knows me well will tell you, I am not an organized person. When I taught Freshman Comp, I lived in constant fear of misplacing a student’s paper. Last November I had the amazing experience of being the Waldo Distinguished Author at the University of South Carolina-Aiken. Many thanks to Andrew Geyer for the invite. In an attempt to drum up an audience Tom Mack wrote an article about my work for the local paper. This week while going through some book bags in attempt to inventory my author copies of books, I ran across the copy of the article Tom had gifted me. I hope my tardiness in posting it doesn’t reflect my appreciation for his efforts. So here it is.

Review of A Living is not a Life

Getting a book review is always scary. To me it’s like getting a paper back. Since I couldn’t spell or punctuate for most of my academic career, and because I had the poor timing to be born before word processors and AI, it was never a pleasant experience.

Recently, the journal Presence and editor Mary Ann Miller sent my book out for review. I’ve pasted in scans of below. I guess I got a solid B+ or so, and I’m grateful for exposure, especially since books by like of Gioia and Mariani are reviewed in the same journal. High cotton for this poet.

Sergei Eisenstein and Narrative Poetry

Last Saturday, I led a class for the Corpus Christi Writers Studio, with my good friend Stephen Jay Schwartz which focused on the similarities of film and poetry. I always thought the two were very closely related, but it wasn’t until someone like Stephen who made a living in the film industry for many years validated the ideas that I had any confidence in my observations. What follow is a recap of my contributions to the class. I hope they are of interest.

Before we tackle why I believe narrative poetry and film are closely related. I’d like to a few minutes to talk about narrative poetry general. I’d like to point out that 40 years ago narrative poetry was totally out of favor and on life support along with rhyming poetry. When the New Formalists released their first anthology Rebel Angels, they included formal and narrative poetry. As formalist like R.S. Gwynn received praise from critics for innovative rhyme schemes, the poetry of BH Fairchild was being called gateway poetry. You know the soft stuff that gets you hooked before you move on the real poetry. When I started writing narrative poems, it was not unusual to get rejection notes from editors that claimed there was no such thing as narrative poetry, or that my poems were only failed short stories. Begrudgingly the genre has gained a bit of respectability and a good deal of life in that last 30 years. I think mainly because it remains popular with the public who enjoy a good story and were happy to see it again.

Personally, mainly because I have a brain that turns everything into a story, I believe there are only narrative poems. Even the most lyrical of lyric poems I believe to be stories mainly because the readers of the poems work their way across each line and then down the page, and in doing so they move through time and space, which is the essence of any story, but I digress.

I also believe the quip about failed short stories shows a real misunderstanding of the nature of narrative poetry. A narrative poem boils a story down to its essence. The narrative poet attempts to make the story immediate. It distinguishes itself from long form fiction through the dependence on images and concision and distinguishes itself from flash fiction through the use of segmentation: line and stanza breaks to further the reader’s understanding. It is the application of images and the use of segmentation where narrative share the same techniques of film. When I was taking my first graduate level creative writing class, I happened to be auditing an introduction to film class. When I read of the theories of early Russian film makers like Kuleshov and Eisenstein, I suddenly had a scale-from-the-eyes moment. The Russian film industry didn’t have the money for stunt doubles and special effects, so they learned to tells stories by juxtaposing images. The example of narrative through image that I first saw was Eisenstein’s formula shot A plus shot B equals shot C. The example I learned was a shot of a man reading a paper crossing a street; shot b, a different man behind a steering wheel suddenly gets a look of horror on his face and jerks the wheel, shot c man lies in the middle of a street as a newspaper flutters away. The viewer puts the three images together and interprets the story to conclude a distracted man got run over in a street. Kuleshov also postulated that one could take a series of shots change the order and tell a whole different story. Here’s a clip of Alfred Hitchcock explaining the theory. Hitchcock clip . Another Clip from a 100 Years of Film on Eisenstein.

The first poem I wrote after being exposed to this theory is in the handout of my poems. It’s Remission. I consider it the first real poem I ever wrote. It changed my life. Early drafts of the poem won the UNT writing award that year, and I was recruited to do a creative thesis. A later draft of the poem was published in American Literary Review. Probably, the highest cotton I’ve ever romped in. In graduate school, people also started referring to me as a poet, and that’s how I was introduced to Alice (nee Adams) Berecka, who told me the introduction perked her interest.

Remission

While shooting hoops
practicing for teams
I wouldn’t make,
I pivoted, faked,
shot, followed through
and wished
she would die.
Follow your shot,
my instincts coached,
urged my frozen legs.
Still, I watched
the ball fall
free from the net.
Bounce, bounce
and roll away.

As a boy,
I was often ill.
Drowsy with fever,
my beaded head
would rest
in my mother’s lap.
I remember
when the medicine
came, how she
raised my head
and pressed it gently
to her breast
which pulsed
and soothed
my ailing
chest and head.

Bed-bound
head shaven,
shriveled she lies.
Her pain
her drugs
I don’t understand,
only her half-formed
words: Jesus take me.
Gaudy jewelry
Rosaries, medals,
brown scapulars
adorn but do not comfort
her foreign shape.
Nor do I,
I only hide
my father’s
razor blades.

Today, the basketball,
flat, covered by dust
lies hidden on some
garage shelf. She,
healed, but scarred
more than most,
finds some comfort
in knowing life
is the only sense
found in pain.
She sits quietly.
My nephew rests,
nesting by her side.
Her paled hair and face,
the child’s easy blond pose
confuse my senses,
and for one moment
I stare at my mother’s
apparition nursing
my childlike ghost.

What did the theory do for me:

I learned the importance of an image (or object) to carry the emotional weight of a poem. In Remission, the basketball becomes associated with the wish that the mother would die and the guilt associated with that thought. Other images carry the weight of religiosity, etc. But I was learning a more indirect but powerful means to write poetry. As a narrative poet, even if I have a good story, I know I need to find an image before I can write a poem. In Of Suffering and Idiots, the thin veneer of the tabletop allowed to get an implied definition of “paper asshole.”

Of Suffering and Idiots
All for one and one for all… Alexandre Dumas

As a kid I could never understand why
my father went ballistic when my Uncle Ben
said something stupid. Everyone knew Ben
was an idiot, a good man of sorts, but limited
at best. In his clumsy attempts to impress,
Ben flashed his profound ignorance. The fact
that he dropped out in the third grade never
kept him from claiming that he had aced
calculus. Once when Ben overheard my aunt
and mother commiserating about that time
of month, he bragged as a kid on the farm
he had ridden his menstrual cycle
without training wheels before he had turned
six. Everyone laughed, but my father fumed.
He screamed, Ben, you talk like a guy
with a paper asshole! My wounded uncle
wept, my mother screamed, Albert!
and the rest of us sat there laughing,
wondering, What the hell is a paper asshole?

Today in a meeting, a Psych professor
who is long on ego and short on brains
was holding our pointless committee hostage
yet again with his mindless prattling,
but when he said, …and I for one,
the inane phrase sparked a rage
so hot in my core that it fried the filter
that normally sits between my mouth
and brain, and I found myself barking,
And I for one! What are you, some kind
of schizophrenic musketeer? The virgin silence
slowly filled with the titters of a few committee
members, while others stared at our tabletop,
as if they hoped the etiquette for exiting
the awkward situation I had caused
could be found in its fake veneer.

The prattling pedant blushed and hushed,
then he gave me that hurt—You’re a real
asshole kind of look. And I thought, Touché,
d’Artagnan, but at least I’m not a paper one!

I learned transitions between stanza were not necessary. The end of a stanza is the end of the scene, the fade to black. You can write, meanwhile back at the ranch, but your reader doesn’t really need it ; they will figure it out.

I began writing a lot of comparison and contrast poems letting the juxtaposition of two stories create a meaning for the whole poem. Both the Capra Conundrum and Of Suffering.., fall into this category. In one the story of the father illuminates the story of the son. In the other the idea every time a bell rings an angel gets their wings is taken to the extreme when an immortal monkey trying to type out the works of Shakespeare can’t find the carriage return. The Capra poem was my first Pushcart nominated poem. It was sent up by Michelle Hartman at The Red River Review

The Capra Conundrum

In one corner of the universe
a monkey keeps hitting the I key
of an old typewriter, expecting
the banana that won’t come.

In another corner of the universe,
the angel in charge of making wings
is being overwhelmed with orders
and running out of possible takers.

And in another corner of the universe
preachers and sinners begin to sense
a new hope as the eye of the needle
stretches into a camel-sized hula hoop.

One other thing, although I always look to find an image that can give me a way into writing a poem, I never worry if the image will translate to the reader. Recently, I received my third Pushcart nomination for a poem call The Builder of Bigger Angel Dance Floors. In it I’m really hoping the reader is familiar with the old thought problem, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin.” The poem will have another layer of meaning if they do. But the image that came to me was the barstool and how the seat in of a barstool resembles the head of a pin. With that thought, the three union members became angels themselves, like Humphrey Bogart in the old movie We’re no Angels. In my actual memory a man named Dean Gribnaugh told me about my dad when we had a moment alone at the Moose Club in Maynard, New York. But the idea of the barstool led to We’re No Angels which in turn led to memories of three guys my dad worked with. Lumpy, I believe was his foreman. My family is big on not trusting authority, so Lumpy was rarely spoke warmly of. Goo Goo was perhaps the handsomest man I knew as a kid. He was a union brother of my dad, a Lithuanian American whose last name was something like Gugalauskus, hence Goo-Goo. Crazy Joe was I guy my dad hung out with after he retired. He knew him from the union also, and Joe introduced my father to his second wife. Anyway, with the barstool image, I had a good story, but the image lead to a much better one. Here’s the poem.

The Builder of Bigger Angel Dance Floors

Home from college, one summer weekend
with not much to do, I went to a local bar
with my dad. When he left his stool to piss,
Goo Goo, Crazy Joe, and Lumpy, his co-workers
and union brothers, sidled over to educate me.
“Sport, your old man would kill us if he knew
we told you this, but you should know.
Your father is the best damn welder in the local.
They say Al Berecka could weld the heads
of two pins together.” They all shook their heads
in agreement and skedaddled back to their stools
once the men’s room door swung open.
As he reclaimed his seat my dad asked,
“What was that about?” “Ah, nothing,”
I said as the other men nodded knowingly,
and I tried to hide any hint of admiration.
Just as someone asked, “So who’s buying
the next round?” and the bar settled back
to its proper business—washing down pride.

Well, that’s all the random thoughts I have for now, on how Eisenstein’s theory influences my writing to this day. I hope you found this of interest.

ab

The Builder of Better Angel Dance Floors

I got word yesterday that the poem of the title above had gotten nominated for a Pushcart by the Concho River Review. I hold that journal and its editor in special esteem, so to be nominated by them is a great nod. Many thanks to Mark Jackson and Jerry Bradley.

The poem itself came about when a student at DMC got miffed at me when I rebuffed a compliment about my poetry. He asked, “Why do you always do that? “The poem is attempt to answer. The man who actually told me how good a welder my father was known to be was a man name Dean Gribnaugh, and he waited for my father to step away . I’m sure that’s not how his name was spelt. It happen in the Moose club in Maynard New York, or at least that’s my recollection. My father did have co workers with the names I used in the poem though. Here it is. Hope you enjoy.

The Builder of Better Angel Dance Floors

Home from college, one summer weekend
with not much to do, I went to a local bar
with my dad. When he left his stool to piss,
Goo Goo, Crazy Joe, and Lumpy, his co-workers
and union brothers, sidled over to educate me.
“Sport, your old man would kill us if he knew
we told you this, but you should know,
your father is the best damn welder in the local.
They say Al Berecka could weld the heads
of two pins together.” They all shook their heads
in agreement and skedaddled back to their stools
once the men’s room door swung open.
As he reclaimed his seat my dad asked,
“What was that about?” “Ah, nothing,”
I said as the other men nodded knowingly,
and I tried to hide any hint of admiration.
Just as someone asked, “So who’s buying
the next round?” and the bar settled back
to its proper business—washing down pride.

Petty Expectations

My new boss, the same guy who says he fears
ending up in a poem someday, as if
that could ever happen, sits waiting
earnestly for my reply to his question,
but his query does not compute,
so I squirm in my seat and sweat.

I reconsider the question,
“What can we do to make you love
your job?” An extended paid leave
keeps bolting from my brain,
but I grind my teeth shut,
not wanting the truth to escape
because there’s the mortgage,
car payments, and my extravagant
lifestyle that being a librarian
at a community college affords me,
so I nix going all in with honesty

and remain stumped. I mean ever since I signed
my first deal with Mammon one summer
to bale hay for a crazed dairy farmer
and moved on to engagements as garbageman,
turd herder, weed wacker, mailroom geek,
parking lot attendant, telephone operator,
freshman comp teaching fellow, newspaper
delivery man, microfiche filer and then finally
falling into this gig as a librarian, I have never
asked for more than a decent wage and a sane boss
from any job, while my wife, our kids, our friends,
my family, faith, and art have provided me
with more meaning, joy, and love than any man
has a right to expect,

but my boss is still waiting
on an answer. I decide to aim low and ask
to be taken off nights. He shakes his head slowly,
breaks eye contact and begins to explain
that because of budget cuts and hiring restrictions,
I will remain as enamored of my job as ever.

From Alan Berecka’s A Living is not a Life: A Working Title; Order at Amazon

Introduction to A Living is not a Life: A Working Title

I have worked since the summer I turned 18. This summer, I’ll turn 62. If I’m honest, I doubt I ever looked forward to going to work. I guess I never stumbled into the job that was meant for me. I’ve always been ok with that circumstance. Work paid the bills, and if I was lucky, it didn’t get in the way of life. I know plenty of people who feel the same way. I also know people who enjoy their jobs. They say crazy things like. “If I won the lottery, I wouldn’t quit my job.” Leaving those in my tribe of the discontented to wonder why someone would pony up the money for a lottery ticket, if they were just going to keep working? We have never understood the need to work beyond the financial.

There are also a tribe of workers who believe one should be happy in their job. To be discontented at work is a sign of a lack of moral fortitude. As the folks in my tribe see a job as a way to get by, these folks see a divine calling. Their often-spouted mantra is— “If you love your job, you’ll never work a day in your life.” These folks are often self-employed, or near the top of org charts. People who believe they make a difference in the lives of others can end up here as well: doctors, lawyers, teachers of all kinds, and preachers to name a few. Among these folks are those that believe no one can do the job as well as them. I have often differed with their opinion. Teachers seem susceptible of this trait, but I once had a friend point out to me, that if you spend years having large groups of people write don’t everything you say, you’d feel important too. When I look back at the five years I taught as teaching fellow, all I remember is the fear, and a fervent hope that I wasn’t wasting the time of those assembled in front of me. I tried to discourage them from writing down what I said, while hoping somehow their writing could improve. After she graduated and student from my first class dropped by my office to thank me, saying it was the best one she had taken. I thanked her, but apologized on the behalf of the University, for this truly should not have been the case.

This difference between my friend’s observation about the job of teaching and my actual experience of teaching, illustrates the one the great truth of work which I believe I have uncovered, everyone thinks everyone else’s job is easy, normally until they try it. And all though different jobs may require different amounts of effort, I really doubt there are any easy jobs. It’s been my experiences employers are never too happy to just fork over money for no reason.

In poems that follow, I try to remember the vast majority of the jobs I’ve held, try to take a look at the concept of work and try to have some fun while doing so. To the few who will read this book, many thanks for your time and support.

Should you be interested in obtaining, a copy email me at aberecka@yahoo.com or purchase from these on-line stores.

Order at B & N

Order at Amazon

Poems Aren’t Jokes, or Are They?

Before I start writing about poems and jokes, I want to tell you about my golf swing, which is much closer to a bad joke than it is a work of art. I have been playing the game since I was twelve, and the only part of it that I have ever mastered is the mulligan. For you the uninitiated, a mulligan is a do-over, or to put it more bluntly, it’s a way to cheat. Anyway, many years ago I got into a terrible slump. I mean I was hitting the ball so badly that even I could tell something had gone terribly wrong, so I kept going to a driving range hoping to figure out the problem. At some point I went to the range with a friend who happened to be left-handed. While there, I asked him if I could try one of his clubs before I gave up the game for good. When I set up to hit the ball, I noticed my shoulders had to be at a certain angle to keep the club face square at address, and I realized I had lost that position as a right-handed player. Now, I didn’t go on to get my PGA card, but I was able to return to my status as a bogey golfer, well if you don’t count a few mulligans here and there, and there. In this paper I hope to change your perspective about poems and give you a fresh way of looking at them that might help your writing the next time you tee a poem up.
 
Now some might be offended by the title of this paper, and I don’t mean to say that poetry or most poems are jokes. Even humorous poems carry more weight than a joke, and I believe we can all tell the difference between a joke and a poem. For the last two decades or so I have become known in a few small circles as a poet who uses humor, or perhaps a humorist who happens to write poems. The use of humor came naturally to me, I guess, but I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that I’ve always been fascinated by jokes. I was the nerdy kid in school who bought and memorized jokes books and memorized comedy albums, and yes, other kids tended to keep their distance. The first poet who piqued my interest when I was in high school was Ogden Nash, whose poems exhibited a joyful love of playing with language that one often finds in good jokes. For example, Nash wrote this ditty, often misattributed to Dorothy Parker, that offers us all sagely advise: Candy/ is Dandy/ but liquor/ is quicker. Because I have spent so much of my life immersed in jokes and poetry, I have often wondered how they work. This curiosity has led me to study in poetry workshops all over the country with master poets such as Scott Cairns, Bridgit Peegan Kelly, and BH Fairchild. I have also read most of the books I could lay my hands on that deal with the psychology and philosophy of jokes and humor. After all this effort, I can report with some confidence that no one knows the formula that will create a sure-fire successful poem or joke. If you ever come up with one, your formula will be more precious than the recipe for Coca-Cola or for the batter at KFC. However, a few years ago while reading the late Ted Cohen’s book Jokes: Philosophical Thoughts on Joking Matters, I began seeing similarities between the way poems and jokes work, and I believe this crosspollination has helped me to see a few things about poems I hadn’t realized before. So what follows is a left-handed attempt to try to gain a little understanding about poems.
 
The first element both forms have in common is a reliance on concision. We all know this an important part of poetry. Here’s a short poem I wrote to illustrate the point.

Poetry 101
 
A prattling child, effusive
to a fault, I rambled on
through giant buck teeth.
 
I slurred my words
on a three-day bender.
 
The dissonance rubbed
my mother’s nerves raw.
 
She told me often, Son,
words are precious.
Don’t waste them.
 
We’ve all heard the theories about poets using the best words in the best order: nothing more, nothing less. But this isn’t the aspect of concision that I want to talk about. What I’d rather turn my attention to is how concision works in jokes or perhaps I should say, I’d like to explore how the demand for concision causes jokes to work. Here’s the thing about jokes, much of the context we need to understand how a joke works lies outside of the joke. A joke relies on a shared a body of knowledge between the teller and listener to work. If you don’t believe me, here goes… “Knock, Knock, (insert your reply), Dwayne, (insert your reply). Dwayne the bathtub; I’m dwoning.” It’s not just the context we share, but we also agree not to think too hard about why a man drowning in a bathtub could be knocking on your front door. A second example, that exists in the State of Texas where I live is the Aggie joke which pokes fun at those who attend Texas A&M. Texans know what to expect from the poor butt of the joke, and it lies in a shared understanding ,or should I say misunderstanding, of the intellectual capabilities of the Aggie. But should we not share the same context, the joke is destined to fail. Certainly, one thing that poems and jokes share is that they lose quite a bit of their impact if they have to be explained. For example, I am told that before the fall of the Iron Curtain in the Soviet satellite countries like Poland there was a very popular joke that goes like this: “I hope we get invaded by the Chinese Red Army 6 times.” One person would say the line to a listener, and both would laugh uproariously. As Americans what keeps us from getting this joke are two things. The first is geography, and the second is not knowing how much the other people in Eastern Europe hate the Russians. If we understood this context, we would know nothing would be more pleasing to a Slav than having the Red Army march through Russia 12 times. Oddly, even after we have the proper context, the idea of the joke might amuse us, but it will never have the impact it had in Eastern Europe 30 years ago. This joke’s failure reminds me of when I was an undergraduate 40 some years ago and my English prof swore that Eliot’s Wasteland was a great poem, and my response was something like “Well ok, if you say so.” At this point, I’d love to talk about how the modernist took poetry on a wrong turn away from the shared context of society writ large and began using a context only the intelligentsia could understand on a good day, but that is another essay all together. And I think one could also argue that the dependence on a context outside a work and the creation of context within a work is perhaps the greatest difference between poetry and prose, but let’s kick that exploration of this observation down the road as well and look at another device that poems and jokes have in common. They both build expectations only to break them.
 
Here’s an old joke to illustrate the point. So they automated the intake desk up in heaven, and Jesus figures St. Peter can use a day off. After all he’s been at it for around two thousand years. So Jesus tells St. Pete, to go and enjoy himself, and after a bit of convincing Jesus tells Peter, “Look I can handle it, besides it’s all computerized now, so how hard can it be, all I have to do is type a name in.” Just after St Peter goes off to enjoy a few hours of paradise, a very old man walks up to the desk, and Jesus asks for his name. The old man looks puzzled, and finally replies, “I can’t remember.” Jesus does not panic, after all, he’s Jesus, so he tells the old man that he needs a name so he can type it into the system and see if the old man can stay or needs to seek other accommodations, but he reassures the man not to worry. Perhaps if the old man can tell him something about his life, Jesus, who knows a few things, can figure out the old man’s missing name. The old man thinks and thinks and finally remembers, “I had a son.” Jesus says, “Well that narrows it down, but I still need more information. Maybe you could tell me something about your son?” The old man thinks for a while and says, “My son, he had holes in his hands and his feet.” Jesus suddenly gets a little unnerved. He hasn’t seen his father for quite a while, so he leans across the desk and whispers, “Father?” At which point the old man’s eyes brighten and he responds, “Pinocchio?”
 
And there you have it, a classic example of how jokes build expectations only to break them. So now I want to show how I have used the understanding of a needed shared context and building expectations to help me write some poems and give you a couple of tricks that might help you. One of the poems I’m best known for retells a story from a semester I spent in Rome, Italy when I was a college sophomore. I really struggled with how to get the reader to understand when and where I was as the poem unfolded. I wrote a notebook worth of drafts of the poem trying to figure out how to place my reader in the same context, but the poem always started with a very prosy and flat stanza, until I finally came to the realization that a certain part of a poem lies both outside and inside a poem, the much overlooked and underutilized poem part called the title. I realized if I just gave my poem a very boring title that told the reader where and when the action took place, we’d have the needed shared context. Here’s the poem.

St. Peter’s Square 1979
 
College kids half drunk on cheap spumante,
we decided to stand at the barricades
for hours. As the crowd grew behind us
so did our plan. The new Polish Pope
was returning from Mexico and would pass
within earshot. We knew that he was known
to stop and bless or converse with pilgrims
who spoke his native tongue. The grandson
of Polish immigrants, the group looked to me,
but my vocabulary was bluer than the Pontiff’s
eyes. I feared my broken second-hand Polish
was more likely to land me in the bottom
of some secret and dank Vatican dungeon
than it was to gain us a Papal audience.
 
Plan B, we decided to consult our foreign language
pocket travel guide. Short of receiving the Paraclete’s
gift of tongues, phonetics became our only chance.
We leafed through the little Polish it offered, looking
for some phrase that even Americans could pronounce.
Happy with our choice, we practiced in unison
as if we were again pre-communicants chanting
the Baltimore Catechism until we had it right.
 
That night as the young Pope rode past
a few feet away, we shouted in our best Berlitz,
Where are you going with our baggage?
 
The passing years bent the Pope
in half and hid him behind a cold
plastic mask, but I still relive that night.
Often in a dream, I see his confused look
snap around to our direction, and I swear
I can hear him answer, Too far, my son, too far.

I started writing that poem when I was working on my creative thesis at the University of North Texas back in the mid 80’s, but I didn’t include it in my thesis because all the early drafts of the poem ended at the question about baggage. I thought the poem was good, but I sensed it was a bit more of a joke than a poem. Fast forward another ten years to when I came back to poetry after a self-imposed hiatus. I remember watching some religious event on TV and the commentator said that John Paul II looked as if his body had taken on the suffering of the whole world. Bingo, I had an ending to this poem that took the poem from being about a flippant remark shouted to gain attention, to an unexpected truth about how the pope looked like he had taken on the baggage of the world before he passed, as well as anything else a reader could read into the ending of the poem.
 
Titles cannot only build context; they can build an expectation in the reader which you can play off of as a poet. What follows is the title that I’m most proud of; I love the way it’s meaning is revealed in the last line of the poem and how that meaning turns the reader’s understanding of the narrator.
 

 
Skeletons
 
As a kid I always found it harsh
when my mother claimed that if given
the chance to live her life over,
she’d become a cloistered nun.
 
My father, an old dog, loved to roll
in life’s dirt. One night after I graduated
from high school, my bags packed for college,
he swayed up to me, a fresh Manhattan
sweating and sloshing in his hand. He offered
me slurred advise. Kid, ya know if I could
do it all over again, I’d been an effing pimp.
 
After returning from my semester abroad,
I handed out souvenirs. I gave my mom
water from Lourdes, a rosary blessed
by the Pope and a cheap t-shirt. I brought
my dad brandy from Spain, a Hofbrauhaus
half-liter stein, and second-hand accounts
of his World War II Pig Alley haunts.
 
My mother enjoyed her gifts, especially
her John Paul II t-shirt. He stood arms raised
and spread, glowing in black and white.
That it was two sizes too large didn’t matter
to her. She wore it often and took to saying
again and again, I can’t believe how happy
the Pope looks. My father, who believed
only to a certain point, finally broke one night
during our family meal. To her constant refrain,
he shot back, For Christ sake, Stella,
I’d be ecstatic too if I had a tit in each hand.
My mother looked down. The Pope looked
up, smiling, her breasts resting in his open palms.
She said nothing. I brayed and snorted, laughing
along with my bent and breathless dad.
 
A few days later, the shirt appeared, hanging
neatly in the corner of my closet. I didn’t wear
it much and never in my mother’s presence.
 
 
What I especially like about that title is that until the poem introduces the closet in its next to last line, the title is a bit of a mystery. When the reader gets to the last line and the mystery of the title is revealed, there’s a good chance that the reader has the same flash of guilt that the narrator of the poem is feeling, and that feeling is really heightened by the title.
 
However helpful a title might be, it’s important that it doesn’t give too much information to the reader and ruin the twist. To illustrate this point, here’s a story about a joke. Many years ago, I attended a poetry workshop in what used to be a gas station in Marfa, Texas. The workshop was one of the most productive weeks as writer that I have ever experienced, and I wrote many early drafts of the poems in my first collection The Comic Flaw. The workshop was led by two great poets Scott Cairns and Bridget Pegeen Kelly. One night everyone went out to the observation area outside of town in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Marfa lights. While we waited, I told Bridget the Geppetto at the pearly gates joke that I told you a few pages ago. Bridget loved the joke, and the next day as her nascent poets settled into our places, Bridget got the attention of the class and asked, “Alan will you please tell everyone that Pinocchio joke.” After that introduction, the joke never stood a chance.
 
Just like titles, endings of poems can be tricky not unlike a gymnast’s dismount. Going for a big ending is a great temptation for the poet, which can lead to the common mistake where a poet tries to surprise the reader with something that has nothing to do with the rest of the poem. After the reader’s initial surprise, the next reaction is something like, “Huh?” and the poet who thought he had stuck the landing ends up slipping on the mat and getting marked down by the judge. When I was working on my last book, I was confronted with the problem of having a great ending that seemed to fly out of nowhere. I had a title I liked that wasn’t quite solving my problem, so I turned to another ancillary part of a poem to build context and expectations: the epigraph. Here’s the poem and you can be the judge this of technique’s effectiveness.
 
 
Of Suffering and Idiots
All for one and one for all… Alexandre Dumas
 
As a kid I could never understand why
my father went ballistic when my Uncle Ben
said something stupid. Everyone knew Ben
was an idiot, a good man of sorts, but limited
at best. In his clumsy attempts to impress,
Ben flashed his profound ignorance. The fact
that he dropped out in the third grade never
kept him from claiming that he had aced
calculus. Once when Ben overheard my aunt
and mother commiserating about that time
of month, he bragged as a kid on the farm
he had ridden his menstrual cycle
without training wheels before he had turned
six. Everyone laughed, but my father fumed.
He screamed, Ben, you talk like a guy
with a paper asshole! My wounded uncle
wept, my mother screamed, Albert!
and the rest of us sat there laughing,
wondering, What the hell is a paper asshole?

Today in a meeting, a Psych professor
who is long on ego and short on brains
was holding our pointless committee hostage
yet again with his mindless prattling,
but when he said, …and I for one,
the inane phrase sparked a rage
so hot in my core that it fried the filter
that normally sits between my mouth
and brain, and I found myself barking,
And I for one! What are you, some kind
of schizophrenic musketeer? The virgin silence
slowly filled with the titters of a few committee
members, while others stared at our table top,
as if they hoped the etiquette for exiting
the awkward situation I had caused
could be found in its fake veneer.
The prattling pedant blushed and hushed,
then he gave me that hurt—You’re a real
asshole kind of look. And I thought, Touché,
d’Artagnan, but at least I’m not a paper one
 
Although the epigraph of this poem just might be the weakest I ever used, I hoped it would plant a seed in the reader’s mind, so when the poem turned to the Three Musketeers, the trio wouldn’t come riding out of the blue.
 
In closing, I’d like to invite you to consider the context you need to place your poem in, and how much of the context you expect your reader to know, the next time you write a poem. Remember that titles and epigraphs can help build needed context or create an expectation in your readers that you can play against or break to great effect in the poem that follows. Thoughts, questions, feel free to contact me at aberecka@yahoo.com.

Poetry of Light

I was recently contacted by Kerry Keys, a friend I met when I went to Lithuania to take part in a poetry festival a few years. Kerry asked me if I would review the collected works of Jonas Zdanys for the Vilnius Review’s English version. I was honored to have the chance to write the review, but also scared because the book covered 50 years of the work of an important poet, whose work is known well in both Lithuania and in the US. This link will take you to the final product. http://vilniusreview.com/reviews/432-light-of-poetry

Poet Laureate of Corpus Christi?

Yes it’s true. As of February 23, 2017, I am, by proclamation of the City Council of Corpus Christi, the poet laureate of Corpus Christi. Ever since that night, I get asked a  few of questions fairly often.

The first question is how did that happen? Basically, there is a group of poets in the Corpus area who got to know each through an open mic series that has been held at Del Mar College. This group of poets banded together and decided to host a poetry festival in Corpus. The poetry festival was going to have a big kick off night, and someone thought since we didn’t have enough money for a keynote reading that if we had a poet laureate maybe it would add interest to the event. I’m not really sure because I missed that meeting. My fellow Corpus poets assure me that my missing the meeting isn’t the only reason I became the first poet of Corpus Christi, but it didn’t hurt. I have to say the group of poets included Juan Perez, Tom Murphy, Javier Villarreal, Robin Carstensen, Odilia Rodriguez, Malia Perez, Lou Ella Hickman, Stefan Sencerz, and I’m not sure who else might have been there that night. The thing is anyone of these fine writers could have been worthy of being honored, so no matter how much I try to poo-poo the nod, because the honor comes from such talented writers and good friends, the title has meant quite a bit to me.

Don’t you live in Sinton? Yeah, I do, but Sinton is a much harder poetry market to crack. Even though I say this in a tongue-in-cheek manner check out the Dictionary of Literary Biography someday, and you’ll find a long article on the poet Ronnie Burke who was actually born and raised in Sinton. Not that many people in town seem to remember him. Burke wrote mainly in Spanish and his poetry was surrealistic and he may be more famous as an AIDS activist, but he’s in the DLB and that’s high cotton. Anyway, I digress. All the poetry events I have hosted over the years have been in Corpus at Del Mar College where I have worked as a librarian for the past 20 years. In the proclamation it says I initiated the idea for having a poetry festival in Corpus. If saying, maybe we should start a poetry festival in Corpus someday counts then this is true, but so many people worked to get the festival off the ground, I feel a little swarthy taking credit for that.

So what does a poet Laureate do? Great question. I’m not sure I’ve figured that one out. Even before I was poet laureate, I was asked fairly often by local teachers to go to area classrooms and share poetry. I often ask these teachers if they have seen my poetry? My stuff isn’t exactly G rated.  But we normally find a poem or two we can use for a short talk. But really I have no idea what the duties are which is probably a very good thing.

How much does a poet laureate get paid? Guy Clarke said it best, “There ain’t no money in poetry, and that’s what keeps the poet (laureate) free…”

When will there be a second poet laureate of Corpus Christi?It seems attendance at our festival meetings has really picked up, but someday someone is going to absent. Until then I’m happy and honored to play along.

Albert’s Eulogy

My father has always been a large part of my poetry; the reason many folks have been attracted to my work. In the poems he is a literary character who is very sure of himself. I’m not sure that was my father, who tended to be an anxious man, who would reassert himself in the damdest ways. I hope what follows is a eulogy for the actual man and not the character. The two have become married in my mind, and that has been the heavy cost for me for writing so much about him. Here’s my remarks minus the tears and halting voice:

My sister has asked me to say a few words about my father. She also told me to make my remarks church appropriate. As those of you who knew my father know, these parameters cause a certain problem. Because Albert Berecka, a onetime merchant marine, could aptly be described as salty. But beneath the crust and bravado, he was a good husband who enjoyed two marriages that lasted over 20 years each; he was a good father, grandfather and a loyal friend. He was generous with his time and talents, often volunteering at St. George’s church, or helping friends and relatives with repairs and projects. During the summers, farmers would appear at our house to ask him to weld their equipment. He would go to the farms and refuse payment for his labor. He awoke often to find anonymous offerings of produce and libations on his front porch.

His life was guided by many rules. Maxims that Janis and I called the Rules of Albert. Among these dictums were never visit someone again, until your visit is repaid; don’t look for sympathy; go to mass on Sunday; the longer the sermon, the smaller the offering. Albert, don’t worry. This talk will stay in the money.

The most important rule was to be honest. To that end Albert lived a quest to reveal hypocrisy and prick at the pretentious. He often accomplished these tasks by saying the most inappropriate things at the most appropriate times.
He lived this way to the very end. While his health and memory failed in his last days, Janis would remind him daily that I was coming in from Corpus to visit. Each day he’d ask, “Why’s he coming?” Not wanting to say that I was coming to make sure I got a chance to say good bye, she would make up a different excuse each time. One day she said, “Alan’s coming because he misses me.” Albert gave her that look that only Albert could give and said, “I don’t think so!”

As you all know, Albert was not a saint, but was as unique and authentic as they come. And in spite of his flaws, he was a good man, who tried his best. And if we are really honest about it, what better thing can be said of any man.