NOTE: This post is
rated R for mild strong language, gross imagery, and crude sensual themes.
Introduction
Sometimes I don’t have time to think up a blog topic. Taking a cue from the movie industry, and
from the Book of Ecclesiastes, I’ve decided there’s nothing new under the sun
and I’d better just rehash some old material this week. So I’m posting two of my old poems—one that’s
30 years old and another that’s almost 20—and providing all-new commentary in
the form of footnotes. Pretend you found
this in your Norton Anthology of American
Teen and Sophomoric Adult Poetry.
The Blue Tube Club –
spring 1986
Splat mud splut, Cow chud cud, Dog dung stunk.
Nose snot rots, Booger blood, Anal hair; 2
Armpit sludge, Dick Butkus, Damp crotch rot.
Happy love, Friendly peck, Snuggle up,
Happy-sap, Special friend, Hugga bunch; 5
Smurfy love, Special coo, I Love You.
Stupid jerk Fire Up Total butt
You all suck, You’re a prick, Gimme that; 9
Go to hell, God you suck, Just shut up!
Footnotes &
commentary
Title: The Blue Tube Club
The Blue Tube Club was a club that my two oldest brothers
and two of their friends formed in the mid ‘80s. If you think four people is barely enough for
a club, you’re probably right. This club
was either too elite to accept others, or (more likely) its members were too
shy and self-conscious to do much outreach.
What isn’t disputed is that they refused to offer me official
membership, despite the fact that I hung out with them most of the time anyway. The idea, I think, was for me to be really
bummed out about this and press my nose sadly against the window, wishing I’d
be invited in to play their reindeer games.
In fact, I couldn’t have cared less. This was put to the test when my brother
Bryan asked me to write a letter to the Casper, WY Chamber of Commerce thanking
them for allowing the Casper Classic bike race to be held there. I refused.
(My perspective: what did some
local government functionary need with another piece of mail to process?) Bryan said, “Come on, think of the Club! What is the Blue Tube Club? It’s a bunch of guys helping each other. You know, like Bill drives us everywhere, and
I fix the Volv’ [Bill’s car], and Geoff welded the roof rack, and I fixed the Volv’, and Dave … well, Dave makes us laugh. So you should write that letter. It’s time you started pulling your weight.”
To which I replied, “First off, I’m not even a member of the
Blue Tube Club, as you’ve made abundantly clear. Second, I’m not interested in pulling my weight.”
This last quote became my signature utterance. To this day, it’s occasionally trotted out as
proof of … well, something fundamental about my character, I guess.
Byline: Maynard Steele
Maynard Steele was (and sometimes still is) my pen-name. I didn’t come up with it
myself. In junior high French class we
were passing around the sign-up sheet for the student directory, and (unbeknownst
to me) my friend Phil erased my name and wrote in “Maynard Steele.” That’s how it came out in the directory, and
I decided to run with it.
Line 1: Splat mud splut, etc.
It doesn’t take long for the astute reader to realize there
isn’t much meaning in this poem; it’s arguably more nonsensical even than Lewis
Carroll’s Jabberwocky. This was an assignment for my high school
creative writing class. The teacher, Mr.
Kroop (I hope I’ve spelled that right) assigned us a “Kroopian poem,” which had
the requirement of being written in dactylic trimeter.
What is dactylic trimeter?
It means each line had to consist of three dactyls in a row. A dactyl is a foot of poetry with the first
syllable accentuated and the next two syllables not. An example of a dactyl would be the word
“hangover.” You place the emphasis on
the first syllable and then the next two are non-emphasized: HANG-over.
Another example would be the word “jettison” (JETT-ison). In normal speech, you might occasionally
stumble across three dactyls in a row, like “GO to the MAR-ket and STEE-al stuff,”
but I wouldn’t say it happens a lot.
At the time, I was furious about the assignment. It seemed impossible to write a single line
of dactylic trimeter, much less a whole poem.
So I decided to be really sneaky and write the whole poem using nothing
but single-syllable words. I erroneously
thought that strings of one-syllable words couldn’t be proven to be
non-dactylic. (This isn’t actually true,
as I’ll get to later.) Figuring my poem
would be nothing more than a blatant act of rebellion, I didn’t bother much
with the meaning and basically wrote whatever words popped into my head.
Line 2: Booger blood, Anal hair
As you can see, I kind of faltered in my pugnacious resolve
to use only one-syllable words. Perhaps
the better part of my brain realized that two-syllable words could be employed here without too much
difficulty, and to good effect. As you
can see, both “booger blood” and “anal hair” are properly dactylic. They’re also pretty gross, which was my way
of celebrating the freedom I had in Kroop’s class to write whatever I
wanted. Mr. Kroop was famous for not
only letting students write short stories that were brazenly, graphically
sexual, but for reading these stories aloud in class. (This was probably a myth: when I was in Kroop’s class nobody wrote such
stories, and no student work was read aloud.)
Line 3: Dick Butkus, Damp crotch rot
This line demonstrates my failure to grasp dactylic
trimeter. First off, “Dick Butkus” isn’t
dactylic. I was correct that “Dick” is
accentuated in this phrase, but I failed to notice that “But” also is. It’s “DICK BUT-kus,” not “DICK butkus.” If you don’t believe me, just ask him. And while you’re at it, ask him why he never changed
his name. What kind of nutjob would
willingly go around with a name like Dick Buttkiss? Why didn’t he at least go by Richard?
The phrase “damp crotch rot” shows where my all-one-syllable
strategy failed. It’s pretty much
impossible not to accentuate a word like “crotch.” It’s a word that demands emphasis, even if you’re embarrassed to say it. And the phrase “crotch rot” naturally comes
out as the trochaic “CROTCH rot,” perhaps
because—specifying, as it does, the kind of rot we’re talking about—“crotch” gets the
emphasis, as would any word it its situation.
Consider this line of would-be iambic pentameter:
His house was fairly riddled with dry rot.
It sounds wrong, doesn’t it?
The last syllable of a line of iambic pentameter is supposed to be
accentuated, but you cannot accentuate “rot” in the phrase “dry rot.” It’s “DRY rot,” not “dry ROT.” Many two-word phrases are like that, as I’ve
explained in my post about how to write a sonnet. “Dry rot” is trochaic, just like “HOT
dog.” And so is “CROTCH rot.” Which makes it even worse, doesn’t it? “Oh man, I’ve got a bad case of crotch rot,
and it’s become trochaic!”
Lines 4-6: Happy love, etc.
This stanza captures my frustration at teenagers in
love. There’s nothing intrinsically
wrong with love, of course, but teenagers are annoying enough without deciding they’re in love. You know how teenagers seem to think they
know everything? It’s particularly annoying
when, at 16, they think they’ve found “the one,” and everybody around them
knows they haven’t, and that this is just a stupid practice fling that will end
in deep embarrassment for both parties, but they still go on like they’ve discovered
what it means to love.
A teen would be arguably better off dabbling in the occult
than messing around with romance. At the time I wrote this poem, my oldest
brother was in love, which involved a lot of snuggling and even cooing. It wouldn’t have been enough to say “Get a
room!”—I wished he and his girl would go jump in a volcano or something. Yes, some of this was sour grapes, but mostly
it was the spectacle of all that James-Taylor-grade sappiness.
At the time, a buddy of mine did a long stint at the Olympic
Training Center in Colorado Springs and had some long phone calls with his
girlfriend back in Boulder. Now, my
friend had the good taste to keep the mushy stuff to himself, and treat the
affair lightly, around his friends. I
suppose that many a teenager was labeled crass who was really just observing a
delicate teen-specific form of decorum.
This could be a group sport: at
one point, another OTC athlete was waiting for the phone, and—perceiving from
my friend’s tone and diction that he was talking to his girl—did a crude pantomime and cried out, “Plow ‘er, dude!” This has become my friend’s signature utterance
(even though he himself didn’t utter it).
To this day, it’s occasionally trotted out as proof of … well, something
fundamental about his character, I guess.
Perhaps it’s out of a residual distaste for sappy, smurfy
love that to this day, my friend and I will occasionally cry out “Plow ‘er,
dude!” whenever some guy starts using goofy language like “relationship.”
Line 7: fire-up
At age 16, when I wrote this, I was a pretty quiet fellow,
as now, but with a very hot temper. This
could come out without any obvious provocation; it could be triggered by male
hormones, typical life frustrations, instinct, impulse, and/or the effect of
being your basic social outcast. This
volatility was exacerbated by those around me.
My two oldest brothers were a study in contrasts: one was dreamy, quiet, largely disconnected,
and (as described above) shamelessly in love; the other, meanwhile, was what
you might call an angry young man. The
angry brother, whom we sometimes referred to as “Mr. A,” once chewed my head
off, without a trace of irony, for stinking up the bathroom, as though that was
some decision I made that could have been avoided—as if I’d decided to crap in
a wastebasket or something. The other
members of the Blue Tube Club could also be a bit hard to take: one had an excessively drippy girlfriend and
liked to blow his nose on his shirt, and the other—a giant guy—liked to wear a
big trench coat, smoke cigars, and make wisecracks 24x7, and would spontaneously
tackle me to the floor and pretend to hump me.
So as a result of keeping this company, and also due to my
essential nature, I would sometimes lose my shit completely. The label my brothers gave to these outbursts
was “fire-up,” as in, “Uh oh, Dana’s on the brink of another fire-up!” My fire-ups were very loud, and this stanza
captures some of that. Of course I made
no effort, as a livid teenager, to yell in dactylic trimeter, so much
verisimilitude has been lost here. For
example, I’m quite sure I used the phrase “total asshole” a lot but never once
said “total butt.” But of course “total”
and “asshole” are trochees, so the phrase “total asshole” cannot be rendered in
dactylic trimeter.
Teacher’s
comment: Did Max help do this?
My brother Max had Mr. Kroop’s class a year before I
did. To say Max was a mediocre student
isn’t really fair. I think it’s more
accurate to call him an F-student. But
he got an A in Kroop’s class, and earned it.
He was, and is, a great writer, and his style, particularly in those
days, was blunt, wild, raucous, and utterly uninhibited. In contrast I was much more reserved, with
poems like “The Paperboy.” So I wasn’t surprised at all that
Kroop saw (or thought he saw) Max’s hand in this strange poem.
A Voice Will Sing – December 7, 1997
Once in a while a voice will sing praises,
Something to levitate everyone’s spirits. 2
Somehow the faithful will manage to fear it,
Calling it chanting from somebody crazed.
Must we all be a collection of skeptics,
Fearing the good we’ve been trying to summon, 6
Finding the evil in everything common,
Feeling that praise is not ours to accept?
Witness your
neighbor and salvage his soul,
Count up his
evils and call them the whole.
10
Footnotes &
commentary
Line 1: Once in a while a voice will sing
After I’d turned in the Blue Tube poem, Mr. Kroop read the
class his own Kroopian poem, and to my astonishment he did just fine with the
tricky meter. The only line I remembered
later was “Once in a lifetime a voice will sing.” It bothered me that I’d taken as impossible a
task that was not. I vowed to try again
at the Kroopian form, but of course never got around to it … well, almost
never. For over a decade I kept thinking
about tackling dactylic trimeter, and finally got ‘er done.
I decided, after much messing about with this meter, that I
didn’t really care for it, and that a slight enhancement would make the lines
gallop along better. I attached a
trochee—that is, 2/3 of a dactyl—to the end of each line, and I think you can
see it helps. Without that last trochee,
the line kind of lurches to a halt, like it’s been clotheslined. Then I decided, having forgotten whatever
rule Kroop made about rhyme scheme, to use an ABBA scheme (reminiscent of a
Petrarchan sonnet), whereby the second line doesn’t rhyme with the first, but
the third line does rhyme with the second, and the fourth line then rhymes with
the first. I also determined, somehow,
that each stanza would have a zippier finish if I lopped off the second half of
the final trochee. To maintain the
rhyme, this final syllable would have to rhyme with the penultimate syllable of
the first line. Thus, “crazed” rhymes
with “prais-,” not “praises,” and “accept” rhymes with “skept-” instead of
“skeptic.”
Rather than paying a verbatim tribute to Kroop’s “Once in a
lifetime a voice will sing,” I changed “a lifetime” to “a while,” because “once
in a lifetime” didn’t makes sense in the context. Plus, I didn’t want anybody to think I was
alluding to the Talking Heads song “Once in a Lifetime,” since I was alluding
to Kroop’s poem (which for all I know was
alluding to the Talking Heads, but no matter). And based on my adjustment to the meter, I
needed to tack on that trochee anyway.
Could “sing” be a transitive verb, setting me up to slap on a direct
object? Sure. What can you sing? A song, obviously, but that’s only one
syllable. “Ballad” is trochaic, but the
fact is it didn’t occur to me. I landed,
rather arbitrarily, on “praises,” which really set up the content of the poem.
Line 2: levitate
This word choice is probably my favorite thing about the
poem. I could have so easily put
“elevate,” but “levitate” gives it a slightly creepy air—are the faithful right
to call this voice a crazed chant?—but also points up the fact that the state
of somebody’s spirits is kind of an illusion.
Anything that improves your emotional health could be reasonably labeled
a placebo, could it not? And your spirits,
though raised up, are always so delicately perched … they could come down any
minute, so isn’t the tenuousness of “levitate” better than the false solidity
of “elevate”?
Line 8: praise is not ours to accept
It’s important to keep in mind that I was fundamentally
unconcerned with the content of this poem.
I was interested only in getting the meter and rhyme right, as this poem
was a warm-up exercise for the real, serious poem that I intended to write next
(and did, in fact, write—but you can’t see it as I wrote it for my wife). So I think it a minor triumph that I managed
to convey any meaning at all with this poem.
Isn’t it odd that religion is supposed to be an emotional
balm, but so many strains of it bring negativity to the table? For example, if somebody (even, or perhaps
particularly, your inner voice) buoys up your spirits by praising you, you’re
not supposed to accept—because that would be committing the sin of Pride! After all, all praise be to God!
Line 9: salvage his soul
At various points in my life, certain well-meaning types
have decided my soul needed saving. I’ve
always found that vaguely insulting … like my soul is so far gone that some
chance acquaintance—armed with little more than faith and a bible—can just sweep
in and rescue me. To me, such spiritual
meddling is like a salvage operation.
(Both “salvage” and “salvation” stem from the Latin salvare, to save.) As these
do-gooders pick through the apparent disaster of my spiritual world, what bits
and pieces are they looking to rescue before leaving the rest to slowly
dissolve at the bottom of the sea? And how
is this operation supposed to bring a message of hope?
Line 10: call them the whole
In all likelihood nobody has made it this far into my
solipsistic morass of literary criticism, and even if somebody has, nobody is
taking my quasi-religious rambling very seriously. But if you have, and you are, please remember
how little attention I actually paid to the content of that poem. If changing a word made the meter or rhyme
right, I did it, whether meaning was served or not. In that sense, you could change this final line
to “Count up the syllables and call that the whole”—but then it wouldn’t be
truncated dactylic quatrameter! It
wouldn’t be neo-Kroopian! See how this
works?
--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--
No comments:
Post a Comment