Little Known Clauses in Arizona’s New Immigration Law

Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal May 2, 2010 and the Iowa City Press-Citizen May 5, 2010

1.1) Redesign the dollar bill
to get the Latin off the rear.
If you can't spend a buck in English
your money's no good here.

1.2) E pluribus unum is out as well
since Latin can't make us one.
1.3) And Mardi Gras is finis too
since anti-English is anti-fun.

1.4) Say hasta la vista to Ricky Martin
for living La Vida Loca.
1.5) And it's au revoir to Starbucks too
for serving café mocha.

1.6) Ban Twain and Hurston from de schools.
Dose di'lects make us skittish.
1.7) And Shakespeare gets the sack of course
for penning his plays in British.

1.8) Sayonara to taekwondo,
sushi, and haiku.
1.9) And say goodbye to "Arizona"—
it needs an English nombre too.

Levi Johnston's Racy Playgirl Cover to Hit Newsstands

Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal on February 13, 2010 and the Iowa City Press-Citizen on February 18, 2010

Not to be outplayed by Sarah's hand
with its cheat-sheet of keywords and platitudes,
he'll stake his claim as the most famous dude
in what's become a Plain Wonderland,
and down that twisted, icy, rabbit hole,
Levi—baby daddy, Bristol's ex—
will show off his abs and hairless, airbrushed pecs
and ask us to think he's baring us his soul.
But Palin Wonderland won't miss a beat.
Todd will say he's going out to ski.
Sarah will write "condemn him" certainly.
The Queen of Hearts will win a Senate seat
and somewhere, in a basement in D.C.,
the Cheshire Cat will lick its dirty feet.

Poetry & Pop Culture Heroes: Firefly, Sci-Fi, & the Latterday Chronicles of Lewis Turco

In Joss Whedon's short-lived, much- acclaimed, 2002 TV series Firefly, the show's main characters repeatedly refer to "The Universe" as "The 'verse"—an abbreviation that suggests, to Poetry & Popular Culture at least, that outer space is one big poem and that Captain Malcolm Reynolds and his team of intergalactic space cowboys have set out to read it all.

This overlap of poetry and science fiction isn't new to Firefly, though. While we were browsing the used books section at the local Book Bin, for example, we came across a stack of decrepit old magazines including the issue of Fantasy and Science Fiction from February 1962 pictured below. On taking a look at it, we landed on a poem by Lewis Turco—a University of Iowa Writers' Workshop graduate and prolific author of a bunch of books including eleven poetry collections and The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics. Turns out, Turco—who also writes under the pseudonym Wesli Court—penned "Excerpts from The Latterday Chronicle" while studying under Paul Engle and Donald Justice at Iowa. This struck the P&PC office interns as kind of odd, for when they think of poets trained at the Writers' Workshop, they don't at all imagine them wanting to publish in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. So we caught up with Turco and asked him to explain himself.

Poetry & Popular Culture: Can you explain yourself?

Lewis Turco: Sure. I wasn't "trained" at the Workshop, I was almost entirely self-taught. I was publishing poems in my home-town paper's poetry column all through high school, and when I graduated in 1952, I went into the Navy for four years where I bought and studied prosody books and anthologies of modern poetry. I began publishing in the "little" magazines when I was 19 years old...

P&PC: Wait a minute. What do you mean you wrote for the local paper? Did you write good bad poetry?

LT: You bet. In my teens I was a high school correspondent and cub reporter for the Meriden, CT, Morning Record, and I was the morgue clerk—the "morgue" is the clippings file that newspapers kept of their stories which were clipped out and filed for future reference. I won a local fiction prize in 1949 and that story was my first publication in a local paper. From then on I wrote all sorts of things, including news items and verse for the local papers.

P&PC: Sorry to interrupt. Back to sea.

LT: In the Navy, I was a yeoman—not an English farmer but an office clerk—and sailed around the world (actually) aboard an aircraft carrier, the Hornet. There's nothing for a clerk to do at sea, so I read a lot and wrote a lot—the ship had a good library. By the time I got out of the Navy and went to college, I was already better published than many of my teachers at UConn. In college, after the Navy, besides receiving the G.I. Bill (which is why I'd enlisted), I was awarded two scholarships by the Record newspaper. The reason I got into the Workshop was because of my publication record.

P&PC: "Excerpts from the Latterday Chronicle" (pictured to the left) wasn't the first poem you'd published in Fantasy and Science Fiction either. What did people make of this habit?

LT: While I was a grad student in the Workshop, I submitted two poems to F&SF, which I'd been reading since issue one. Both were accepted, and the first, "A Great Grey Fantasy," was published almost immediately, in January of 1960. "Excerpts" wasn't published until 1962. I don't remember people having any reaction to either poem. The Workshop people would have sneered if they'd known about it, and academics didn't read sci-fi or fantasy then, though they do now.

P&PC: But Engle had just written a libretto for a Hallmark Hall of Fame opera, A Christmas Opera, by Philip Bezanson, which aired in 1960. Would Engle have sneered too?

JT: I'm sure he would not have. In fact, I was his Editorial Assistant in the Workshop at the time, working on a Hallmark anthology, Poetry for Pleasure, and another for Random House, Midland: Twenty-Five Years of Fiction and Poetry from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, so I may have shown him "A Great Grey Fantasy," though maybe not—he was gone off campus so much.

P&PC: Where's the rest of The Latter Day Chronicle?

LT: There is no more. The "Excerpts" were merely meant to suggest the rest of it.

P&PC: We're used to talking about "genre fiction." What would it mean to talk about "genre poetry" as well? You know, "I read a lot of sci-fi poetry..."

LT: I don't know if it still exists, but there used to be a Science Fiction Poetry Association located in Los Angeles. They published a magazine called Star*Line, and I used to publish there and in their Rhysling Anthology of prize poems. But you know, this idea of "genre" writing annoys the hell out of me. Edgar Allan Poe wrote fantasy poetry, and so have poets throughout history. Anybody ever read Beowulf or Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, or "La Belle Dame sans Merci" or The Faerie Queene, or "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner," or "A Midsummer Night's Dream"? Gimme a break.

P&PC: Well, what's the future hold for such poetry then?

LT: Last night my wife and I went to see the new movie Avatar. It's a great sci-fi/fantasy flick, the biggest one ever and great fun. I suspect that writers of all kinds are going to keep on writing imaginative literature in every genre. When I was teaching, I used to tell my students, "Writing is writing." There will continue to be good writing in every genre.

P&PC: Live long and prosper, then.

LT: May the force be with you.

How Can Santa Claus Make a Profit?

—Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal on December 21, 2009, the Tallahassee Democrat on December 24, 2009, and the Iowa City Press-Citizen on December 25, 2009

Early on in his career
he asked that question too—
hooked Rudolph up to a circuit board
until the red nose blew,

packaged reindeer meat for sale
and billed it as organic,
and had the elves work every day
in a constant state of panic.

He brought in scabs to break the unions
and raised insurance fees.
He said there needed to be more jobs
then sent them overseas.

Then he looked at himself in the mirror.
He was old and fat.
Making a profit had turned him grey
and the reindeer called him "Rat!"

During the stroke he saw the light
and vowed to take up giving.
He doesn't make a profit now.
Instead, he makes a living.

Limbaugh to Judge Miss America Pageant

—Appeared in the Salem Statesman-Journal November 1, 2009

The studio is quiet now.
The staff has all clocked out.
The issues have been flogged to death.
There's no room left for doubt.

He turns the "On Air" sign to "Off."
The microphone is too.
Yet he stays in his seat and thinks.
There's still work left to do.

He judges right and wrong all day,
heroically and hurried.
But judging a beauty pageant leaves him,
frankly, rather worried.

For what does he know of beauty—
of fields of stars or flowers?
He is the star, fielding incoming calls
every day for hours.

He deals with pageantry all the time.
He's got some talent there.
He practices his scowl and then
a very studied stare.

What's Good About Bad Poetry? The Case of Patrick the Starfish

Check out Michael Leong's beautiful take on the stinky poetry of Patrick the Starfish from SpongeBob SquarePants. An excerpt:

"A pessimist might observe that SpongeBob and Patrick’s dispersal of bad poetry lowered the aesthetic standards of the town.... A similar pessimist might make the case that bad poetry should stay private, that Bigshot Records— much like vanity presses—lures subpar writers with the illusive promise of fame and recognition. Yet, to me, there is a performative exuberence in Spongebob and Patrick’s blaring, gum-attached gramophone that makes it seem like an ultimately salutary, and even revolutionary, gesture for Bikini Bottom—that it shocked the town out of its rigid aesthetic categories. I want to optimistically think that at the very moment when that fish thought “You know—It’s not that bad,” some kind of aesthetic recalibration occurred, that Patrick’s poem redefined his notions of what art can be."

Guest Posting: A Review of Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song"

Poetry & Popular Culture correspondent Jeff Charis-Carlson risks his reputation as a generous reader and publisher of "good bad poetry" by giving Elizabeth Alexander's inaugural poem a chilly but not Frosty reception.

I really wanted to like Elizabeth Alexander’s inaugural poem "Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration." After all, I’ve been working for three years to encourage local poets to find a broader audience and to comment more directly on the events of the day.

I’m even very forgiving with the poetry that I print on the Press-Citizen’s Opinion page. I’ve been known to occasionally print some poetry that is just "bad," but most of it has lived up to the "good bad poetry" aesthetic my collaborators and I have been cultivating. (Some even might even qualify as “good good poetry.”)

On top of that, I’ve spent far too long on a dissertation about novels and stories set in Washington, D.C. — which means that I’ve forced myself to read a whole lot of bad fiction and to learn to appreciate when it’s bad in new and interesting ways.

But even I lost interest as Alexander read her poem. I can appreciate the difficulty that she was under — the occasional poem is a hard form for literary poets to master — but I found nothing sonorous and very little memorable about the reading. And, because Alexander was following Barack Obama’s speech, she really needed something that came across as more than just prosy — something that would have given people the words they needed to sear the day’s events into their memories.

The closest she came was in her now most quoted line, "Say it plain: That many have died for this day." If Alexander had sent me the poem to edit, I would have suggested that she start with that line and then take her own advice by "(saying) it plain" throughout the rest of the poem.

Maybe Alexander, a professor at Yale, was simply the wrong choice for an inaugural poet.

Maybe Obama should have found a poet — like Maya Angelou or Robert Frost — who had much more experience viewing himself or herself as part of a broader audience.

Or, maybe I’m just being a curmudgeon, and Alexander’s "Praise Song for the Day" will go down in history as a great inaugural poem and will serve as an exemplar for occasional verse for decades to come. After all, the poem is be released as an $8 paperback, 32 pages, on Feb. 6, and its publisher, Graywolf Press, has announced a 100,000 first printing.

But I’d be surprised if it does. And I’d be more surprised if “Praise Song for the Day” manages to outsell its main competition, Angelou’s "On the Pulse of the Morning," which became a million seller after it was recited in 1993 at Bill Clinton’s inaugural.

Aretha Franklin, on the other hand, did a great rendition of “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee.”

Jeff Charis-Carlson writes from Iowa City, IA, where he serves as the Opinion page editor of The Press-Citizen which regularly prints verse commentary about the day's news. Check out Charis-Carlson's piece on the advantages and disadvantages of publishing newspaper poetry at The Masthead. On Inauguration Day, the P-C ran its own inaugural poem, "Yes, We Can," by former Iowa poet laureate Marvin Bell.

Chicago Politics

Appeared in the Press-Citizen on December 12

You say you like the North side best?
We’ll say we like the South.
Talk badly to the press of us?
We’ll slug you in the mouth.

Send our guy to the hospital?
Yours will show up dead.
Brag your books are in the black?
We’ll cook ’em till they’re red.

Hope to hold your convention here?
We guarantee you’ll fail.
And your guy goes to Washington?
Another goes to jail.

Good News About "Good Bad Poetry"?

Imagine the surprise over here at "Poetry & Popular Culture" to learn that one of this blog's favorite terms—"good bad poetry"—is now being bandied about by the folks over at the Poetry Foundation which, in its own words, "exists to discover and celebrate the best poetry and to place it before the largest possible audience." On the Foundation's blog "Harriet," Javier Huerta begins "Mcgonagalls All" with the November 29 declaration, "More and more I am convinced that what we need now is a revival of bad poetry" and goes on to try to distinguish between "good bad poetry or bad bad poetry."

Now, far be it from "Poetry & Popular Culture" to take particular umbrage at the Poetry Foundation's use of the term "good bad poetry"–despite the fact that Huerta doesn't cite the essay "Writing Good Bad Poetry" that appeared in the November/December issue of Poets & Writers Magazine and that was excerpted on this blog back in October. No, I repeat, there is no umbrage taken, in part because the term "good bad poetry" is an adaptation of George Orwell's term "good bad fiction." While the Poets & Writers essay did acknowledge the Orwellian origin of "good bad poetry," it's perhaps no surprise that the folks at the Poetry Foundation want to make it seem like the term originated there—in the million-dollar Chicago offices of the nation's oldest and most prestigious little magazine. After all, it's Poetry's own standard-bearer T.S. Eliot who famously quipped that while good writers borrow, great ones steal—a quip Eliot himself cribbed from Oscar Wilde.

No, "Poetry & Popular Culture" takes no offense at this, nor even at Huerta's own description of bad poetry as "a value neutral category of writing that involves the affected, the hyperconventional, the ornamental, the anticlimactic, the disproportionate." What does rankle "Poetry & Popular Culture," however, is how quickly Huerta's posting reduces the expansive category of "good bad poetry" to humorous poetry. Barely 75 words into his blog posting, and immediately after distinguishing between "good bad poetry" and "bad bad poetry," Huerta brings up the International Society for Humor Studies and, from there on out, "good bad poetry" and "humor" become inseparable. The specters of Ogden Nash, Mark Twain, and William McGonagall are raised to debate the intentionality or unintentionality of humor, while the larger category of poetry that "involves the affected, the hyperconventional, the ornamental, the anticlimactic, the disproportionate" goes entirely unexplored.

While it's nice to see the term "good bad poetry" gain some currency, it's a shame—though admittedly predictable, too predictable—to see its simultaneous devaluation at the hands of the Poetry Foundation. If the Foundation really is "committed to a vigorous presence for poetry in our culture" as it says it is, then it should be wary of such mischaracterization and explore, instead, the many other ways that good bad poetry—and its ornament and convention—might do more than just provide a chuckle or two for the folks in the Windy City.

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"