Constant Reader

Why So Serious?

Poetry is always starved for attention. It has been declared dead at
least 200 times in the past hundred years. And with its every death
comes a resurrection. This week, Elizabeth Alexander will become the
fourth poet ever to read at a presidential inauguration—I’ll take
a close look at Alexander’s poem on Slog on Inauguration
Day—and if she does as fine a job as her body of work
(particularly The Venus Hottentot) suggests, we could have a
best-selling poet on our hands for the first time in years.

It’s not all good news: Locally, poetry has been used for nefarious
purposes. Poet Mark Doty’s work was plagiarized by a letter-writing
terrorist wannabe claiming to possess weapons-grade ricin and
threatening to poison people in random gay bars. The chilling lines
from the letter—”The targets won’t care much that they’ll be dead
and nearly frozen, just as, presumably, they didn’t care that they were
living…”—were from a poem about dead mackerel on display in a
market. On his blog, Doty expressed sorrow and shock at seeing his work
appropriated and transformed into a death threat:

The poem was written in 1994, in the awful latter days of the AIDS
crisis here, when there was no hope in sight and the losses just went
on and on… now here are my lines twisted to a new context, and what
was intended to suggest consolation is instead bent to an occasion for
creating fear.

Now that poetry is appearing in so many newspaper headlines, in
conjunction with coronations and an unhinged drama queen’s harbinger
of doom, it’s important to remember that sometimes poetry can exist
simply to make the reader laugh. Recently, New Mexico publisher
Destructible Heart Press published a handsome chapbook called An
Inaccurate Theory of Everything by Seattle poet Jeremy Richards.
It’s a perfect example of how a poem can be smart, affecting,
and funny.

The book opens with “T. S. Eliot’s Lost Hip Hop Poem” (“Straight out
of Missouri,/Harvard University in your face./I’ve got ladies in
waiting all over/the place, singing each to each;/do I dare eat a
peach?… For I will tell you/that I have scuttled across the floors of
ancient clubs…”), and it continues with poems that start with a
standup comic’s sense of playfulness and land with a perfect
dismount as something more profound. One poem theorizes about
amnesia foam mattresses, the logical opposite of memory foam (“Who
are you? ask the coils./Why do you feel so familiar?”), and
ends with a meditation about how past relationships are inevitably
forgotten (“The secret to balance is to fall/In every direction at
once”).

Richards’s best lines meet at exactly the intersection of bitter
and sweet: “She laughed, stared into the bottom of her wine glass,
then/looked up and ruined the next six months of my life.” It’s the
easiest thing in the world for a successful poet to become heavy with
solemnity and seriousness. But now, when Seattle seems plunged in
endless winter and doom, it’s important to pay attention to the poets
who can leaven the sorrow.