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.