Writing Good Bad Poetry

As regular "Poetry & Popular Culture" readers may well know, for the past two and a half years I've been writing poems for the Opinion page of Iowa City's daily newspaper, the Press-Citizen. Topical, occasional, oftentimes humorous commentaries on the week's news, these poems are aggressively embedded in specific historical and journalistic contexts and happily go forth into the world eschewing notions of artistic timelessness and universality. Insofar as they do so, they hearken back to the days when newspapers across the U.S. regularly ran poems as part of the daily news—news that sometimes stayed news (newspaper poets actively debated their day's hot-button or wedge issues such as abolition and women's suffrage), but that more often than not ended up as the next day's fish wrapper.

The current issue of Poets & Writers Magazine—buy yours today!—has a longish look back on the 60-plus poems I've written for the Press-Citizen and the virtues and perils of trying to revive the tradition of "good bad poetry" in the present day. Here, to whet your whistle, is an excerpt:

One of the things that sticks in my mind (and in my craw, admittedly) after two years of reading and writing Poetic License poems, however, is a poem that the paper wouldn't print, and the very fact of its nonpublication suggests there are limitations to how good bad poetry can function in public forums like the Press-Citizen. At the time, the University of Iowa was trying to hire a new president, and the Iowa board of regents had, in many people's minds, overstepped its authority by conducting the search in secret without input from faculty, staff, or students. As the faculty senate deliberated how to express its disapproval, I wrote:

It's time for a no-confidence referendum.
The Regents are broken, so let's end 'em.
Let's make the process transparent
and the next search as apparent
as Britney showing the world her pudendum.

I liked the limerick because, like many good poems as well as good bad poems, it cuts two ways. On one hand, it argues for a more open search process. On the other hand, in voicing that opinion via the tabloid example of Britney Spears, the poem begins to sound like a send-up of those arguing for a transparent process: Do we really want the search to be that open?

In the end, [editor] Charis-Carlson returned the poem to me with profuse apologies, explaining that some higher-up at the paper had objected to my use of the word pudendum. I protested, of course. It's an anatomical term most frequently used in clinical contexts. Slate magazine used it in a headline. It's entirely in keeping with the limerick's popular bawdiness, and readers would clearly recognize that. Charis-Carlson said he sympathized but said there was nothing he could do; it was officially too dirty for the paper. So I thought about it and realized that Charis-Carlson's prudish higher-up wasn't necessarily objecting to the word per se so much as to the poem's implication that official university business might in fact occupy the same discursive world as Britney Spears's genitalia—which is kind of dirty. I quickly rewrote the poem to demonstrate the fact and sent it back to the Press-Citizen.

The presidential search is the pits.
The Regents are giving us fits.
Let's make the process transparent
and the next search as apparent
as Britney showing the world her naughty bits.

That verse, it goes without saying, was also returned to me, as well it should have been: It's not nearly as good a good bad poem as the first version was. But in the process, I learned that even Poetic License comes with a few restrictions.

A Few Good Bad Poems:
"OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel"
"Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111"
"Cat Chasing Mouse Leads to 24 Hour Blackout"
"Man Faces Jail for Smuggling Iguanas in His Prosthetic Leg"
" 'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office"
"O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident"

My Poetic License - An Introduction

In March of 2006, Iowa City's daily newspaper, The Press-Citizen, began printing poems on its Op-Ed page as part of a regular feature called "Poetic License." Hearkening back to a time 50-150 years ago when American newspapers regularly ran poems that explicitly engaged the day's news, "Poetic License" encouraged its contributors - yours truly among them - to be as topical, occasional and political as the best letters to the editor, and as biting, satiric or humorous as the best editorial cartoons. "Today's news is tomorrow's fish wrap," editor Jeff Charis-Carlson often reminded Poetic License writers - what he called his Deadline Poets - in an attempt to get us to come down from Parnassus and to write quickly and frequently so as to better help fill his page.

As recently as the 1950s, The New York Times was in the habit of running poems amidst the letters to the editor in its pages, but it's rare to see a poem in such contexts today. In restoring poetry to the Op-Ed page, though, Jeff didn't want to repeat Ted Kooser's nationally-syndicated column "American Life in Poetry" which features a Kooser-approved poem by a recognizably "literary" poet that is then reprinted in paper after paper across the U.S. To the contrary, Jeff wanted "Poetic License" to be an aggressively local feature: written by Iowa City poets for Iowa City audiences and oftentimes taking on topics of such local orientation that "outsiders" need a good deal of background in order to understand where the poems are coming from. The term "Maytag" in "Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEO's Expect to Cut Jobs" for example, resonantes very differently in Iowa than it does elsewhere, especially since Whirlpool's 2006 acquisition and closure of Maytag manufacturing plants, once the economic center of Newton, Iowa.

Jeff eventually got in the practice of running illustrations - photographs, or sometimes hilariously-done ink drawings by the Press-Citizen's editorial cartoonist - alongside PoLi poems as well, creating provocative text-image conversations. Oftentimes, the poems dialogue clearly with other pieces on the Op-Ed page. This editorial dynamic is impossible to duplicate in this blog, where I'm simply excerpting some of my contributions to PoLi and recording them.

Gannett News Services, which owns the Press-Citizen, has a policy that keeps PoLi poems (like other materials) online for 4 weeks, after which those items vanish. As much as I'd like them to become tomorrow's fish wrap, I also don't want to see them - or the experiment that PoLi is continuing - completely disappear. There are many questions that PoLi has inspired and that are worth thinking through, including:

• How can poems complicate or trouble an Op-Ed page chock-full of otherwise straightforward or transparent declamatory prose?
• What does poetry have to do differently in 2008 to work in a journalistic context that it didn't have to do 100 years ago?
• When poets do come down from Parnassus and embrace the ephemerality of the daily news and the specificity of the local event, what new freedoms do they find?
• What sort of a poetics takes shape under the pressure of a deadline?
• What is the public response to PoLi, and how does one measure and track that response?
• Who decides to write for PoLi and why - a question especially relevant to Iowa City, which boasts the Iowa Writers' Workshop full of poets who have never sent poems to the paper?

Many writers not affiliated with the Workshop have contributed to Poetic License over the past 2+ years, each developing over time a signature style, politics, approach, tone, rhetorical flexibility, etc. (Most recently, for example, I've been using actual news headlines as my poem titles, and after experimenting with various verse forms, I seem to have settled in - improbable as it sounds - to writing sonnets.) Contributors have worked more or less closely with Jeff, who sometimes participates so heavily in the writing process that he might claim co-editorship. In sum, PoLi has become a fascinating laboratory in which to track the possibilities of re-embedding poetry in one aspect of print culture today as thoroughly as it once was for generations of Americans in the U.S.

The following are some of my contributions to this research. Who says you can't get the news from poetry?