As a boy, drawing girls was always important to me. I didn’t understand them. I couldn’t control them other than to make them dislike me. I couldn’t get away from them… but I could draw them. I could completely control what the picture looked like. And I could make them be whatever I wanted.
Lines and shapes and contours… a smirk on the lips… a twinkle in the eye.
It’s not easy being green…. the color of so many ordinary things…
Especially as you grow older.
Because green is the color of growth and youth and life. But those things seem beyond the grasp of your outstretched fingers on your spotty and wrinkled old hand.
I am definitely no longer green like Littlebit, the Oceanian ship’s boy from the seas of Talislanta and the pirate ship, Black Dragon.
And, yes, an Iowa boy living as far away from an ocean as you can get in the United States, in all directions, you are bound to dream of pirate ships and the high seas, especially when you’re twelve and your favorite book is Treasure Island.
But now that you are old, green is more often your color because you don’t feel well… again… every day….
B
But there is still bright green in dreams.
You can still go there and be a child again in memories and your imagination.
It’s just that now the green is written down in sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and cantos.
And talking to your kids about movies, art and artists, stories and writers of stories…
Did you know the favorite color of all three of my children is green?
I have known it since they were small and I could sing to them songs by Kermit the Frog, like “Rainbow Connections” and “It’s Not Easy Being Green.”
And with paint, you make green by combining the blue of sadness with the yellow of sunshine and happiness.
Lately I have been having memory troubles. You know what I mean, when you walk through a doorway with a definite purpose in mind.and then, on reaching the other room, you have no earthly idea what that purpose was. It happens to me regularly. In fact, I can even start writing a sentences, and then I… What was I talking about? Oh, yes. I need to practice writing some more spectacularly bad poetry, before I forget how to do it.
Why did I use this picture? I don’t know. I have forgotten.
Re-minders
Sometimes…
My mind slips out of my left ear…
And I can’t remember things.
So, I have to search under the table…
To find my mind…
And then I remember that that’s not how a mind works.
Yep, I still obviously remember how to write spectacularly bad poetry. It is my contribution to literature. Virtually all poets will be able to say, “At the very least, I am a better poet than Beyer.”
I am, however, an expert on how NOT to write a good poem.
A truly terrible poem might begin with an over-extended metaphor.
It might begin by saying, “A poem is like a fairy tale, filmed in black and white on 35 mm film stock, with Orson Wells as the director.”
And for the meat of the poem, you use details about the fairy acrobats having an accident on the trapeze, and the circus train derails and has a terrible accident, and the clown never takes his makeup off because he’s on the run from the police… and you totally forget that the movie “The Greatest Show on Earth” was directed by Cecil B. DeMille and filmed in color.
And you have a tendency to “squinch” the rhymes, rhyming “good” with “food” and “dud” with “odd,” and at the same time you put trochaic warts all over the iambic pentameter because as a poet you are not William Shakespeare, and you are not even Buddy Rich because the rhythm sounds more like banging trashcan lids than drumbeats.
In the middle of the poem somewhere it suddenly becomes free verse without a rhyme scheme or reason for the change. And the theme circles back on itself and does a pretzel twist with no logic to salt it with.
And you are a terrible poet like Mickey because, when you write a poem you don’t realize;
the gemstone at the center of your poem must go from your mind, to pen, to paper, to eye of the reader, to mind… and finally to heart…
And the blaze of its beauty must be strong enough to resonate…
and be able to SHAKE THE BONES OF THE UNIVERSE.
And you can’t do it because you don’t even get the irony of that rule.
I do write poetry. But I must admit, I am not a serious poet. I am a humorist at heart, so I tend to write only goofy non-serious poems like this one;
So here is a poem that rhymes but has too much “but-but-but” in it. A poem about pants should not have too many “buts” in it. One butt per pair, please. So this is an example of spectacularly bad poetry. Why do we need bad poetry? Because it’s funny. And it serves as a contrast to the best that poetry has to offer.
As a teacher I remember requiring students to memorize and recite Robert Frost’s poem, “The Road Not Taken”. Now this sort of assignment is a rich source of humorous stories for another day. Kids struggle to memorize things. Kids hate to get up in front of the class and speak with everybody looking at them. You get a sort of ant-under-a- magnifying-glass-in-the-sun sort of effect. But in order to truly get the assignment right and get the A+, you have to make that poem your own. You have to live it, understand it, and when you reach that fork in the road in your own personal yellow wood, you have to understand what Frost was saying in that moment. That is the life experience poetry has a responsibility to give you.
Hopefully I gave that experience to at least a few of my students.
Bad poetry makes you more willing to twirl your fingers of understanding in the fine strands of good poetry’s hair. (Please excuse that horrible metaphor. I do write bad poetry, after all.)
But all poetry is the same thing. Poetry is “the shortest, clearest, best way to see and touch the honest bones of the universe through the use of words.” And I know that definition is really bad. But it wasn’t written on this planet. (Danged old Space Goons!) Still, knowing that poetry comes from such a fundamental place in your heart, you realize that even bad poetry has value. So, I will continue writing seriously bad poetry in the funniest way possible. And all of you real poets who happen to read this, take heart, I am making your poetry look better by comparison.
Born in Maine a boy, when his parents wanted a girl,
They took a full six months before they gave his name a whirl,
And they drew Edwin from a hat drawn by a man from Arlington Maine
And the remainder of his life, “Edwin Arlington Robinson,” gave the poor boy a pain.
And as he grew into a man of letters, he wrote some fine poems at school,
But the woman he most loved in life married his brother, a fool.
And so, he showed a pessimist, in poetry ever mocking and darkly cruel.
And Pulitzers he won three times, the man could write a jewel.
To write such poems as Robinson’s, you must learn what “sardonic” means,
And suffer a lot in crisply-writ verse that tastes mostly like baked beans.
……………………………..
Okay, I know this evil Mickey poem does not do E.A. Robinson justice. He was a fine master of verse-craft. It has been said (by an Iowa State American Literature professor, so I know it must be true) that Robinson, when asked what he did one day, said, “I studied my poem all day, and then added a comma.”
Surprised by the answer, the questioner then asked what he did the next day. ”I studied the poem all day again, and took the comma out.”
Recently I read his book of poetry called The Children of the Night. It is a fine book of sardonic poems (here meaning; poems that are mocking, pessimistic, and cynical… in case you didn’t look up “sardonic.”) He often writes in this book poems about Thomas Hardy and the poems written by Matthew Arnold and other dusty old writers of the late and early 20th centuries. So, I have given old E.A. the same honor in Mickey’s book of poems as he gave them.
