At the Foxhead on Election Night

Appeared in the Press-Citizen November 7, 2008

How to say it except to say it straight?
I saw things on Tuesday night that I
never expected to see and which I’ll try
to tell to my grandkids, who’ll say I exaggerate:
the first black man elected president
amidst fears of war and economic depression;
McCain delivering a genuinely touching concession;
a white man from Alaska, his head bent,
crying after hearing Obama speak;
Chicago’s million-strong all-nighter;
and, to cap off a night of dreaming, a writer
walking into the bar as usual, except this week
his date was a life-size doll of Uncle Sam,
and he was giddy and smiling, and it wasn’t a sham.









More on Good Bad Poetry:

"Writing Good Bad Poetry"
"My Poetic License"
"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"

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"

OMG! Buddhist Nun Texting Novel

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on September 30, 2008

Cn u c hr, reachng out 2 the nxt
genration of rdrs via cel,
renvntng how 2 read nd spel?
Nd as the kids dvour al hr txt
I cn hear the critix strt 2 db8
if this travsty shld b aloud
(cn u hear the rdrs lol?)
nd if the bk cn qualify as gr8.
The nun is 86 bt avant gard
nd if, when 2mrws rainbos snt 2 u,
u feel a lttle shok, well, thts the nu
nd the nu cn b a lttl hard.
2 me, these qs nvr seem 2 nd—
like whats the snd of 1 hand prssing snd?

Main Street Blues

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on September 24, 2008

Why is it when I
get into debt
no one buys me out
(at least not yet),

and my doctor friend
(hear how she groans)
wouldn't get their sympathy
if she failed her loans,

but the second we hear
executives shout,
George Bush and the Feds
go bail them out

with billions and billions
of taxpayer loot
and the only thing golden
is their parachute?

Dinosaur Descendant to be Dad at 111

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on August 19, 2008.

And the paparazzi jump to search their files
for other famous moms and dads,
and to the Angelinas and the Brads
add Henry, paramour of reptiles,
and septuagenarian Mildred, his trophy mate,
who’s still got her looks and a great set of leathery legs.
They stand proudly by their dozen eggs
as millions of tabloid readers salivate
wanting to know about their care and feeding,
Henry’s mysterious past in the New Zealand wild,
whether lizards’ love is doggy-styled,
and whether adoption was an option before their breeding.
But can he be a father? Can he meet their needs?
Children are a blessing, he says. And feeds.

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?

Flood Poem: Almost a Third of CEOs Expect to Cut Jobs

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 21, 2008

The boardroom talk is all about the rising
cost of energy and whether,
if corn and durable goods increase together,
a crest in unemployment is surprising,
merited, excusable, or good
for business in the coming fiscal year,
and how to make this cresting now appear
as natural as a high school textbook would:
history is full of ups and downs,
the nation always—always—comes back stronger
if you sandbag just a little longer
and sacrifice a few Midwestern towns.
For when your Maytag’s lost to the flood’s designs
the boardroom floods as well—with dollar signs.

Flood Poem II: "Croc Dundee" in Tax Fight

Appeared in the Press-Citizen July 9, 2008

For he can hypnotize a buffalo
and he can tell the time by the course of the setting sun
and while his career, like his taxes, isn’t done
it’s a little sad to see him shuffle so.

Why the evasion, Paul? At sixty-plus,
you should be enjoying your golden years,
staging a comeback like Indy with smoke and mirrors.
It’s not too hard entertaining us,

so why the sudden Al Capone routine
instead of a simple fight, the bread and circus?
We’re tired of seeing the favorites who used to work us
hide their heads in the sand and lose their sheen

making a token gesture at the best
like an Aussie quip, or a visit to the wet midwest.

'Lingerie Mayor' Vows to Stay in Office

Appeared in the Press-Citizen January 28, 2008

From negligee to negligence, and bra
to public brawl, it’s clothing and not closure
that’s gotten the mayor’s office its exposure—
not what people said but what they saw.
To Eleanor and her stockings, Monica’s dress,
and Hillary’s skirt-or-suit aporia,
we can add these skivvies south of Victoria
in our discourse of pretentiousness.
For a woman involved in politics—
her city’s in the black (as is she)—
there’s simply no such thing as parity,
not when it comes to the clothes that woman picks.
Her critics should look, instead, at the monsieurs,
for even Arnold’s posed in less than hers.

How Evel Got to Heaven

Appeared in the Press-Citizen, December 2007

in memorium
Evel Knievel, 1938-2007

More than the fire and brimstone downward pouring,
it was Charon’s ferry, paddled safe and swell,
that made Knievel see he’d gone to hell
and worse—that hell was downright boring.
In life, he’d seen his likeness in a doll,
broken sixty bones, jumped over canyons,
and fended off both upstarts and also-rans,
but nothing prepared him for this brutal fall.
No fountains, no jumpsuits, no crowds to cheer him on,
everything painfully slow and on the level:
eternal doldrums fashioned by the devil
and tended without a dare by Satan’s spawn.
How could he escape? What could he do for kicks?
Then Evel looked behind him: the River Styx.

Bronze Fonz in Milwaukee?

Appeared in the Press-Citizen October 1, 2007

Rust belt brewer, metropolis of kegs,
city of knock and brat and cheddar wursts,
we’ve always looked to you to quench our thirsts
and not to give us public art with legs.
Every famous city has its Thinker
but did you really—really?—have to settle
on transforming Mr. Leather into metal
and giving Milwaukee a statue of Henry Winkler?
But metal, I guess, befits a man of cool:
Philly has Rocky, Chicago’s got M.J.,
and it would be a less than happy day
if Bob Uecker got his own reflecting pool.
So raise your mug or glass or plastic cup;
Let’s give the Fonzie project two thumbs up.

O.J. Simpson Questioned in Vegas Incident

Appeared in the Press-Citizen September 17, 2007

I can see him, even now, flying
with the greatest of ease and the grace of the finer arts
over the airport counters and baggage carts,
and I hear, down through the years, the Hertz lady crying
“Go, O.J. Go!” And then a decade later
with the Juice still running—this time in a white S.U.V.
and brought to the nation live on network tv—
we shouted “Go, O.J. Go,” for no one was greater
at legging it into the spotlight, leaping the charges
like a few lousy bags, and landing on his feet.
Now he’s in Vegas, as at home on the strip as at a meet-n-greet.
Questioned and searched yet again, his legend enlarges.
“Go, O.J. Go!” we think as we hear the Law swear:
“We don’t believe he’s going anywhere.”

Mars Being Fed

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 28, 2007

By pipelines, by tankers, he stuffs himself with crude,
reclines like the Roman god he is to feast,
perceiving the world as his private source of food,
his head in Alaska, his feet in the Middle East.
The more he eats, it seems, the more he’s fed,
his arterial highways long past clogged.
He orders his empty-handed servants flogged
and every barrel turns him a brighter red.
And he grows fat. His belly swells with gas.
He knows the oil has ruined his complexion
and will not dare to look at his reflection.
He’s too bushed to limit the habits he has.
He appears on posters captioned “Mars wants you.”
In the picture he’s red, but he dresses in white and blue.

Coyotes Thriving in Suburbs

Appeared in the Press-Citizen June 11, 2007

At first—before their S.U.V.’s and middle-
class complaints about the price of fuel
and the costs of sending the pups to private school—
their moving here was something of a riddle.
Were they in flight? Or were they on the trail
of achieving the Americanine dream,
pushed by the pack, by the need for self-esteem,
and by faith in the Horatio Alger tale?
And if they’re thriving—on Atkins, trash t.v.,
Wild Hogs and Wii—then what of the census
that now reports the rates of poverty
are higher within than without their picket fences?
Will they howl with their pack at the full-moon sky,
or just order a latte and let sleeping dogs lie?