National Poetry Month / Poem-a-Day 2013

Hello, friends. Yes, yes. I know. It’s been almost a year since my last blog post. I’ve been bad. Bad blogger, BAD blogger.   ;-) The occasion for the resurrection of the blog is this: it’s National Poetry Month! And once again I’m going to try to write a poem a day during the month of April. Like last year, I’m taking on Writer’s Digest editor Robert Lee Brewer's “PAD challenge” (PAD for “poem a day”). Every morning in April, Robert will issue a prompt in his Writer’s Digest Poetic Asides blog . . . today, April 1, his prompt is to write “a new arrival poem.” Same as last year, I plan also to pay attention to Maureen Thorson’s NaPoWriMo prompts (that smushed-up word, by the way, stands for National Poetry Writing Month, a now-international project she invented . . . imagine that!). Anyway, Maureen suggests, for Day One, writing “a poem that has the same first line as another poem.” Well, folks, here it is, just the first day, and I’m already cheating on prompts. Tsk-tsk. My poem below refers to new arrivals but they don't really arrive yet. Also, instead of using someone else’s first line as my own, I’m using that stolen line as part of my title. Close enough, though, don’t you think? Besides, it’s April Fool’s Day, right? So we’re just fooling around. April Is the Cruelest Month ... Or, Hoping 30 New Poems Will Arrive April’s blood curdling damnable expectation for gorgeous Homeric iambics just kills limpnoodled me. No OLD pantoums qasidas rondeaus senryu terzanelles . . . Ugh. Verse. Well? Xbox? Yu-gi-oh? Zoloft? —Draft by Vince Gotera    [Do not copy or quote . . . thanks.] I’m really proud the opening line I’m stealing is from T. S. Eliot, because of his often-quoted dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.” So I’m stealin’ from the best, from the master who told us all to steal . . . alright! Did you notice there are 26 words in the poem, not counting the title? What might the number 26 make you think of? Yes! Each word in the poem starts with a letter of the alphabet, in order. To be technical for a moment, this kind of poem is called an abecedarian. Sometimes they are written with 26 longer lines starting with the ABCs in order. Wait, what’s that? I cheated? There's no word as limpnoodled, right? Well, yeah. April Fool’s! Cheatin’, stealin’, it’s all about maturity . . . Dr. Seuss and Shakespeare both made up flapdoodle words.   :-D Okay, that’s it for me for Day One. I hope you liked the poem, even the cheatin’ and the stealin’. In fact, I hope you enjoyed it because of the the cheatin’ and the stealin’! See you tomorrow for Poem Two. As always, ingat. (Filipino for “take care,” remember?) Ingat, everyone. Oh, I almost forgot . . . please comment below. I’d love to hear what you think. Looking forward to your comments! P.S.  Just a little show and tell before I go. I gave a reading last week at the University of Northern Iowa, and I’d like to show off the handsome flyer the good folks at the Center for Multicultural Education made to advertise my gig. Cool, huh? [Click the image to see a larger version.] Thanks for coming back to the blog, friends. Comment below, okay? See you tomorrow. Ingat.   :-) POEM-A-DAY 2013 • Pick a day in April: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Wound, Burn, Glacier: A Poetry Exercise

This past semester — Spring 2011 — I taught a Beginning Poetry Writing course at the University of Northern Iowa. A few minutes before class was to start one day, I realized I had neglected to prepare an in-class poetry exercise, something to get students in the zone, as they say. Looking around my office for last-minute inspiration, my eyes lit upon the most recent issue of the North American Review, which brought to mind the fine short story "VIVA!" by Erin McReynolds. I leafed quickly through Erin's story, looking for a paragraph that had fascinating words in it. I found one that contained the words blue light, wound, burn, glacier, Sssh, crushes. Bingo! Here's that paragraph as it appears on the page, with the exact lineation: My boyfriend sleeps beside me, and his face is peaceful in the blue light of my laptop. His lashes are long and I bend down to kiss them. Because I'm used to telling him every- thing, I whisper aloud the things I find on the Internet. Things like, "A wound to the carotid artery results in a loss of consciousness in under a minute," and, "They burn the organs they remove during autopsy, unless the family wants them put back in, for religious reasons." When he startles, his glacier eyes wild with panic, I stroke his head. "Sssh," I whisper, "it’s me," as if that should comfort him. He blinks at me and then grabs me around the ribs and crushes his face to my chest. I keep stroking his hair, whispering, "The human body contains about five liters of blood." I quickly xeroxed the half of the page bearing the paragraph (making sure Erin's entire name was visible) and then wrote instructions on the remaining white space: Write a 12-line poem using one word from each line in the paragraph shown. The chosen word from each line needs to appear in the same line in the poem. E.g., if you use the word "Internet" it should appear in line 4 of your poem. If you use "chest" it must appear in line 11. Okay? Ready, set, go. I left the 13th line of the paragraph out because it was short and thus had relatively few words. In class, I also told the students they could slightly alter the words, for example, changing "sleeps" to "sleeping." Here's an image of that actual sheet (click on it to see a larger version); the handwriting shows how truly impromptu the exercise was. Impromptu or not, the exercise was incredibly successful. The 12-line exercise poems the students wrote in the course of about ten minutes were quite good, probably due in great part to the haunting strangeness of Erin's paragraph. After the semester, I looked back at the course and saw this exercise as one of the high points in the class. Via e-mail I asked the students if they would be willing to share in this blog entry what they wrote in response to this exercise. Two volunteered: David Hosack and Mandy Paris. My thanks to both of you. Here is Dave's exercise; the words borrowed from Erin's paragraph are in gray at the right. my face is not like yours it does not light up when the phone rings it has never been kissed it sees things as they really are it leaks the results to loved ones before organ transplants go through my face removes smiles from children and disrobes religious men and says "sssh" after the first chords of "happy birthday" my face only blinks when it matters my face is not like yours my face is not like anybody's —Exercise by David Hosack     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face light kiss things results organ remove religious sssh blinks face · · · · David has written a fascinating poem here. I like how he drew from Erin's paragraph an obsessive focus on the face, that idiosyncratic image we advance into the world each day. Notice how Dave finds unusual and striking attributes for the face; my favorite is how the face can say "'sssh' after the first chords of 'happy birthday'" — how we can short-circuit each other's happiness with just a look. Also, Dave makes a savvy rhetorical choice here to abandon the "rules" in the last line: by not using one of Erin's words in his twelfth line, he ends the poem with a convincing and meaningful closing. Bravo, Dave. Mandy, she told me, is usually meticulous in holding on to completed course materials but couldn't locate what she wrote that day. I remember that her exercise was as strong as Dave's. Instead Mandy offered to write something new in response to the exercise. Here is that poem, written at home with more practice, with more than ten minutes grace: I push my face into that crook and I feel you bending against me, limbs locking automatically. You're telling me awful things, about your mother, about your sister. You whisper because this is an open wound. Our hearts beat together. . . . The tip of your tongue burns as it reaches the scalding thoughts at your temple. They remove themselves, but linger, wanting a way back in. Our eyes catch. I have nothing for you — yet you search me. I can't comfort you, I can only blink — and my ribs tighten like ropes around the beating organ that contains every humane wish I had for you. —Exercise by Mandy Paris     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks] face bend telling whisper wound burn remove back in eyes comfort ribs human

Mandy's poem is a heart-rending portrayal of a vulnerable and touching moment shared by two people. Her closing image of the heart both as literal, physical organ and as the metaphorical, metaphysical "font of love," is breathtaking. Brava, Mandy.

The day of the exercise, I wrote along with the students, as I usually do. I was amazed that in three or four minutes, this surfaced:

P O E M   R E M O V E D while being submitted for publication. Please come back later. The poem may return at some time in the future. Thank you!

I'm an aficionado of crime fiction, especially when it centers on forensics. For example, just today I finished a Patricia Cornwell novel featuring medical examiner Dr. Kay Scarpetta. In any case, I guess I'm well-primed to write about this topic. But what really surprised me was how much of a "real" poem this exercise was. I plan to work on this poem more: I need to work out who the speaker is and why he's where he is. Line 10 is an allusion to (perhaps a re-working of) a line in Yusef Komunyakaa's poem "Facing It"; I need to figure out if that echo helps or hurts the poem. Etc.

Since I had a few more minutes — the students were still writing — I tempted and challenged the muses by trying again. Perhaps lightning might ... well, you know. Here's what came of that second attempt:

Mary Wonders Why Her boyfriend was just too sweet, leaving on the screen of her laptop pictures of dancing hearts and kissing birds. All drawn lovingly from the Internet. He never thought of any losses between them, not in a minute. He removed all possibility of anger and defeat from them. Had his reasons. His childhood was wild and panicked: alcoholic father, angry mother, comfort a rarity. He couldn't face it again now. His jagged and scarred past always whispering. —Exercise by Vince Gotera     [please do not copy or quote ... thanks]

boyfriend laptop kiss Internet loss minute remove reasons wild panic comfort face whispering

Not as good, quite a bit clunkier. Too much abstraction. (Probably my students who are reading this now are laughing, knowing how I rail so much against abstraction.) I don't seem to know what the poem's really about until close to the end. But for a five-minute writing, not bad. The fascinating thing here, I think, is that I've got the seed of a short story here: a man who, perhaps obsessively, tries to control his relationship with his girlfriend because of a traumatic childhood. Obviously nothing earthshaking there . . . I need still to find out what's really at stake for the character.

Well, that's all for today. I just wanted to tell you about an exciting learning moment in my class. Please don't copy or quote anything from the exercise poems above. They are only drafts. Thank you for your cooperation with that.

Oh, about the exercise itself. This word-from-line-from-found-text approach is not my invention. I first learned it in a Teaching Creative Writing class taught by Sena Jeter Naslund over two decades ago at Indiana University. Thanks, Sena! In any case, you can find many (probably better) versions of this exercise in books and online. Do try it yourself, though. You might be pleasantly surprised at what you end up writing. There may even be a "real" poem waiting for you to do this exercise. If you do use this exact exercise, I'd like to hear how it turns out.

Please write a comment below. I'd love to hear what you think. Hope you're having a great weekend!



Added 31 December 2011: There's a "reboot" of this in-class poetry-exercise topic in the post titled "Wound, Burn, Glacier ... Revisited" . . . new poetic responses/exercises by the poet Catherine Pritchard Childress. Check it out!

Nathan D and the Sestina Family

A couple of years ago, you may remember, I blogged about the sestina, an intricate medieval poetic form, in a post on my poem "Vietnam Era Vet." Well, it probably won't surprise you that I assign my poetry-writing students at the University of Northern Iowa to write sestinas. And for the most part (at least so I always thought) the students are okay with the form. This semester, in my Beginning Poetry Writing course, it didn't work out quite that way. Several people had quite a tough battle with the sestina. Here's a poem by my student Nathan that deals with that issue in simply hilarious ways.   My Love of the Sestina                 by Nathan Dahlhauser   Over-structuring is the heart of the sestina.   I suppose to say that I hate sestinas   may be a tad harsh, but the thing with a sestina   is that, for one, they are so damned repetitive. Sestinas   may be seen as "classical," to some, but let's be honest. A sestina   is just a sestina. I say, "Fuck the sestina!"   You may ask of me, "Sir, why are you so angry? Sestinas   are just another form of poetry. What did the sestina   ever do to you?" First off, sestinas   use the same words over and over again. I'm using the word "sestina"   to illustrate how annoying this can be. Here comes another. SESTINA.   Would you like me to use a different word? Nope, I'm now bound to use "sestina."   Second, there is very little room to convey emotion or meaning in a sestina   because it is the same words being used. Even in the times where sestinas   do get a message across, the word choices feel so forced. Sestina.   See, I had to end that line with the word "sestina"   because I set myself up for it in the first stanza. All the sestina   does is constrict a poem's motion, much like a tiny room sestina   that resembles a sub-stair broom closet. Sure, I'm being childish and sestina   poking fun at the fat kid in second grade, but I'm not the only one, sestina   NO ONE LIKES HIM! He’s a big FAT fart face! That is the sestina   for you, in a nutshell. Are you as tired of this sestina   as I am? Jesus! Buddha! Allah! By the beard of Zeus! Sestinas   make me curse their maker and their maker's maker by sestina   association. Thank my lucky stars I'm nearly finished with this damned poem!   Shit, did I just slip there and use "damned poem" rather than "sestina"?   Fuck it, it works regardless. "Damned poem," "stupid form of poetry,"   they are both synonyms for that single word. Sestina.   I'm just about done. This here is the last stanza of the ONLY sestina   I will write in my lifetime. What? One MORE stanza!? Fucking poem!   That'll work as well, I suppose. Forgive me if I make this sestina   even more cynical. I've had about enough of the aforementioned word.   Much like Jan speaking of Marcia, I just want to scream to anyone saying sestina, "Sestina,   Sestina,   Sestina!"   I hate Sestina’s family. I hate its sister, Sestina. I hate its brother, also named Sestina.   I hate its parents. Who names three children ALL Sestina?   Fuck you, Sestina! I hope you go to hell and burn with Satan’s sister, Sestina. Brilliant, don't you think? And you might quite easily feel the same as Nathan if you had looked up sestina in Wikipedia, say, and learned what the word-cycling pattern is called: retrogradatio cruciata. Doesn't that remind you of the Cruciatus Curse in Harry Potter, which "inflicts unbearable pain on the recipient of the curse" (Wikipedia)? Unbearable pain, indeed! Nathan's genius touch here is in his repetons (the technical name of the repeated words . . . sorry). Instead of choosing six words, he uses only one. Wow. And how he uses them, that's brilliant too. I was asking all the wrong questions: Was he punning on the word "stanza" (Italian for room) at the end of the third stanza? In the second line of the fourth stanza, was "sestina" standing in for the word "because"? Nope, Nathan said. Just throwing in the word "sestina." 'Cause he had to. Comic genius. Okay, that's it for today. Hope you learned some schtuff about poetic craft. Like the rich consonance at the end of Nathan's poem: the instances of s, t, and n sounds in "Satan's sister, Sestina." Meh. I hope, even better, you had a good laugh. Word. No. Sestina.

On Deviancy in 3 Dimensions

I AM A DEVIANT. I must confess. Yes, I am. And I have been for a whole month now. It's true. What I'm talking about is that I am a new — or fairly new — member of deviantART, an international social network for artists . . . would-be, new, emerging, established, whatever. My little node, my deviant identity, in this network is vincegotera. Yep, that's me. You can do a lot of über-cool things on deviantART: for one, you can upload your own art, called "deviations." I now have 10 deviations (don't know if they're art, really, but there they are). Actually 9 plus a photograph of me I'm using as my "deviantID" . . . it's from a time a coupla years back when I shaved off my mustache. I hated the way it — no, I — looked and you'll see how I kinda solved that problem at that time — at least for the picture, which I used as my facebook photo then. It's also a tribute of sorts to one of my favorite artists. Something I've learned about recently while strolling the avenues of deviants and boulevards of deviations is 3D images (or stereograms) . . . called "free-view" because you can see them in 3D without special glasses. Remember those Magic Eye puzzles that were all the rage a few years ago? Where you gaze at an apparently abstract image and then out of it resolves a "secret" picture that not everyone can see? If you ever learned how to make those hidden images appear, you already know you do it by crossing your eyes. (These stereograms I'm learning about are also called "cross-view" or "crosseye-view" images.) As part of my new "deviancy," I've started making such "crosseye-view" stereograms. Here's my first one, "Exhaling Dissolution 3D." (Click on the image to go to its deviantART page, where I have instructions on how to view it in 3D.) My subject here is the huge wood-and-metal sculpture by Sarah Deppe, a BFA student at the University of Northern Iowa. It's quite a tribute to Sarah that her sculpture — titled "Exhaling Dissolution" — is permanently featured in a courtyard on campus. For those of you who can't simply walk over to see this twelve-foot-tall behemoth head, I hope my stereogram can give you a feeling for its glorious humongousness, its driftwoody enormity. Click on one of the heads above; you'll be amazed. Thanks for letting me "3D" your baby, Sarah. Friends, watch for Sarah Deppe's art in the future . . . you'll hear of her again, I guarantee. Here's another stereogram project of mine on deviantART, a "WIP" or work-in-progress. What you see below are two versions — one with background, one with. Knowing the name of my blog, you'll appreciate my interest in this project. Please click on the guitars directly above and you'll be able to access the two versions. I'd really love to hear which one version works for you (both 3D-wise and otherwise) and why. Please leave your comments on the 3D blue guitar pages in deviantART rather than here. Thanks for your help! Back to the über-cool things you can do on deviantART: they let you compile a collection of other people's artwork (sorry, other "deviants' deviations") and "curate" an exhibition of these objets d'art in your profile. For example, I have a slowly growing little anthology of images that center on the color blue, which I call "Blues." Perhaps not the cleverest of titles, but I'm rather deviantly proud of how it's a musical pun. I am also collecting art pieces on the Filipino monster, the aswang (you might know my poem on that subject). Also images of guitars, of dragons, of steampunk artifacts. Lots more, LOTS more. I hope you'll come and visit my deviantART profile. You'll have a blast. And leave me comments all over the place there. Oh, while we're on the subject, do leave me a comment below as well, please. You'll make me one very happy deviant.

Small Acts of God — Cedar Falls, Iowa

At about 3:30 a.m. Friday morning, July 10, Cedar Falls was hit by a severe thunderstorm that generated straight-line winds of around 100 mph in some locations. Estimates range from 60 mph to 160 mph; one theory for the high winds is that the storm produced a powerful microburst. The effect on the town was a LOT of tree damage: huge branches littering the streets; large trees broken off at the trunk, even uprooted. A garage was demolished, and there were widespread outages of electric power, ranging from minutes to hours to days. Here are some photos of the aftermath of the storm. The first was taken by my friend David Grant. Note the tree which has fallen across a street and onto a car; in the right foreground, a power pole has fallen — you can see a transformer on the pole as it leans away. The next picture, taken by my friend Tiffany Bullen, shows a large tree uprooted completely out of the ground. For a sense of scale, note the two houses shown in the background. Tiffany's next shot also shows a tree that has been uprooted; note at the right of the picture the grass that was formerly at the base of the upright tree. The ground torn up with the tree still carries the grass as if nothing has happened. At the left, you can glimpse a guy in blue who is chainsawing branches; seeing how small he looks will give you a sense of how large this tree is. (In order to pick out Blue Guy, you may have to click on the picture to see a larger version.) Carole Fishback, my friend who is a professional photographer, took this next shot. Her dramatic composition shows what a tremendous force snapped this huge tree like a slim twig. As Carole told me, the damage is like "random acts of violence — some giant couldn't find the tree he wanted so he grabbed this one and that one and left them all lying every which way." Here is a photo I took on the University of Northern Iowa campus. This tree was inexplicably torn in three directions. The large break sent a sizable branch towards the left; a break higher on the trunk sent a larger branch toward the right; and underneath the branch on the left is another branch that is going in yet another direction, toward the low concrete wall. I'm pretty sure all the branches came from this tree because there was not another tree nearby, but how they ended up pointing in these three directions is beyond me. The concrete wall in the background is about three or four feet tall, so the highest part of the trunk is about seven feet up. Pretty amazing. This next photo shows the top portion of a power pole. When I first saw this, the morning after the storm, it was hanging in the air from power lines, with what you see here about six feet above this sidewalk and no pole below. Where the rest of the pole was I don't know. I stuck my head out the car window to take a picture, but Mary Ann said, "Oh no, this is too dangerous!" and took off. So I didn't get what would have been one heck of a photo, but she was probably right. If the thing had taken that moment to plummet to the ground, we would have been in the middle of a mess of flailing power lines. The next three photos show what happened to our city's landmark tree. It has a huge canopy arising out of four joined trunks; the four trunks form an archway that leads toward the front door of a corner house. I wonder how many engaged couples and also brides and grooms have taken a picture under this tree. It's quite a wonderful thing . . . probably made it into "Ripley's Believe It or Not." This close-up diagrams the four tree trunks, in case you couldn't make them out above. And this third shot shows how much of the original canopy was lost in the storm. The last I heard, on the local TV newscast, the jury was still out on whether the experts thought the tree would survive such massive damage. I sure hope it does. Many years of tree husbandry went into this beautiful thing. Well, that's it for now. I'll keep adding photos to the blog if I find other dramatic images. Fortunately, no casualties other than trees. Ironic since Cedar Falls holds the title of "Tree City USA." Thanks again, David, Tiffany, and Carole, for letting me post your pictures here. Stay well, everyone. Oh, and please write a comment below! If you are in Cedar Falls, tell everyone your storm story here. If you are somewhere else, I'd love to hear your reaction. Thanks!

Shh, Shh, Shh

Went to a reading last night: a book-launch event for J. D. Schraffenberger's new (and first) book Saint Joe's Passion (Etruscan Press, 2008). The reading was part of the University of Northern Iowa's "Writers Talk" Reading Series . . . and a welcome to Jeremy, who is a new faculty member at UNI.

Jeremy made a sweet gesture at the reading: along with his own poems, he read a poem by James Hearst as well as one by me. That poem was "Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside," from my third poetry collection, Fighting Kite (2007). (By reading poems besides his own, Jeremy was also furthering the cause of making poetry relevant to our everyday lives, a là Dana Gioia's "Can Poetry Matter?" — a now-iconic essay from 1991.)

Jeremy's reading was simply marvelous, a hint at the scintillating career that lies ahead of my new young colleague. Congratulations on the new book, Jeremy. And thanks again for performing my poem. For those in the audience who might like to see that poem after hearing it last night:

Newly Released, Papa Tells Me What It's Like Inside Vin, that psych ward is Dante's Inferno — circles within circles, you climb and climb. The sons of bitches in white, they're monsters and devils. You see, son, you're paying for your sins while you're there. Each circle a privilege you purchase with blood and bile. It starts with seclusion, the innermost circle. Almost a jail, but your bed's made up with wet sheets and you become Satan on ice — the teeth chattering inside your head, stones rattling round and round in a can. Then once a week, they take you down for shock, the mouse killed again with an elephant gun. First time was '46: the bed just like an electric chair — electrodes, colored wires — That's all I can remember. Except for that shock, vibration, a lightning flash dead in the eyes. And on your tongue a taste like bitter almonds or wet pennies. A buzz in your ears like flies. Closest to outside is the circle called grounds privileges, they let you walk all the way out to the high, black, wrought-iron fence surrounding the whole hospital. Air, trees, grass, flowers, the sky. Only the fence, your blue pajamas, saying you're different from real people. But how do you get there? Between is a tortured drama: wide, sloping stairs of kowtow and kiss-ass — mixing with real lunatics, the gamut running from rapists to certified pigstickers, manic depressives to schizos. And always the devils in white, those sadists and macho bitches. But, Vin, it's always the walk I'll remember. The Thorazine shuffle. We're all diviners doomed to Dante's Eighth Circle: our heads on backwards for time eternal. We shuffle like mules rounding a millstone, wish it would end . . . we shuffle in line for lunch, we shuffle in line for meds, in line to piss, we shuffle in line . . . our slippers whispering shh, shh, shh. — Vince Gotera, first appeared in The Kenyon Review (1991). Also published in the collection Fighting Kite (2007).

My father was a schizophrenic. This doesn't mean he had multiple personalities — the layperson's usual (mis)understanding of schizophrenia. It meant, among other things, that my father sometimes heard voices, saw visions. In the Philippines, this meant Martin Avila Gotera was considered a visionary man. In the US, it just meant he was crazy.

During my childhood, my father was often in and out of psych wards. In "Newly Released . . ." I imagine Papa telling me what life is like inside the psych ward at the VA hospital. Some of the material in the poem comes from things my father did tell me, for example, about his being given shock therapy at Letterman Army Hospital, though the details about that in the poem are wholly imagined. The wet-sheet treatment is also something Papa endured.

I suppose some readers of the poem may think of the Dante connection as arising out of my literary background. Well, first, my father was himself a fiction writer who studied literature avidly and so quite likely could connect with Dante. In fact, he was quite an aficionado of The Divine Comedy. Second, my grandfather, Papa's father, Tatay, had in his sala (the formal living room), a copy of The Divine Comedy, an edition with the Doré engravings; as a small child, I used to sneak into the sala (I think now that maybe that room was off limits to the grandkids, because I remember sneaking) and pore over that huge volume. Not for the text so much — I didn't really read Dante until I was in college — but for those illustrations. I remember vividly the one that showed people walking with their heads facing backward, a punishment for the sin of foretelling the future. There was also another showing sinners rending their chests open . . . for what infraction I have no clue.

This poem is also the result of a one-sided competition with my former teacher David Wojahn at Indiana University, where I earned my MFA in poetry. "One-sided" because I don't think David knows about "our" competition. I remember one day in an MFA workshop, 20+ years ago, David had us read and discuss Craig Raine's poem "In the Kalahari Desert" which ends with this striking line: "Shhh, shhh, the shovel said. Shhh . . ." At a poetry reading some months later, David read a poem that also featured the word "Shhh" in the last line, and he may have even mentioned his own competition-of-sorts with Raine. Not to be outdone, I eventually produced my own poem with "Shhh" as an ending, however petty and unpoetic that might sound.

In terms of craft, the poem is written in terza rima, Dante's rhyme scheme: aba bcb cdc, etc. Of course, as I suggested was my frequent mode in the previous post, I use slant rhyme, very slant rhyme. For example, "sons" / "sins" / "seclusion" or "kiss-ass" / "——stickers" / "Vin, it's." Quite distant rhyme in some places, then . . . in the case of those last three words given in that example, the two similar vowels, the trochee stress pattern, and the ending /s/. With regard to meter, perhaps predictably, a "roughed-up" pentameter (again, see the last post).

When I was in the Army, my MOS ("military occupational specialty" or job) was Military Pay Clerk. For a time, I worked at Letterman Army Medical Center, where I helped mentally ill patients (all military service members) with their pay problems. This was where I learned about the system of privileges (that we see also in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). In the poem, I have my father use as a metaphor for that system the concentric circles of Dante's Inferno. (Ironically, my father was also a mental patient at Letterman Army Hospital three decades before I worked there.) It was also at this job that I witnessed what everyone called "the Thorazine shuffle," the way the drug Thorazine made patients essentially catatonic.

As far as larger thematics are concerned . . . that's your call. I didn't have any axe to grind, I don't think, when I wrote the poem. At some level, I guess, I hope you are getting some idea about how the mentally ill have been treated, historically, by American medicine. Though I'm not on a crusade or whatever. I do wish my father had had available, during his lifetime, medicines like Prozac and other contemporary anti-depressants. They would have made his life easier. Nevertheless, he held down a job; he toughed it out, as men in his generation were supposed to do; and he held on to his dignity. What more could one ask for?