Let the Man Prance

Well, some of my friends can't be bothered to comment on the blog, but when prodded have responded that I've been rather introspective in the last few entries. This is true, and more so than I had every intended when I started blogging. I like to make fun of things, myself being among the more popular subject. Lately, though, I've been using the blog as a diary more than a fun forum, and this must stop. I can't get famous some day and have the news media stumble across a dark and self-involved blog which then causes them to compare me to Poe or Anais Nin. That just won't do.

So, for a change of pace, I'm going to publish one of my papers. Before you freak out, no, it is not the one about the object-usage conflict in Hamlet's Act 4, Scene 7; it's not the one about antifraternal literature and the Canterbury Tales; and it most certainly is not the one about borders in male poets writing female subjects. In all honest, I was bored writing the last two, so I certainly wouldn't subject you to them, and the first has far too many mentions of the word "breast," which would probably result in my blog showing up on internet searches between porn and the La Leche League websites. This paper is about poetry and gymnastics, and I really enjoyed writing it. The publication of something I've already written also gives me time to do something else during the time I would normally spend blogging, mainly cleaning the house before its owners return tomorrow. If I'm done by 2:30, maybe I'll sleep instead of staying up. Doubt it'll be done by then, but it certainly can't hurt to try. Anyway, on to the manifesto. :)

Hopping Across the Mat
or
A Place for Light Verse


I have never enjoyed watching male gymnasts perform their floor routines. Every four years, demigods from across the globe garb themselves in small shorts and wristbands, clap their hands in resin or chalk and take their duck foot positions at the corner of a springy blue mat. They bow to the judges, bow to the audience, and then dart forward to launch into a plank front flip of at least nine rotations before touching ever so lightly down in the opposite corner. On the next tumbling pass, involving variations on a somersault and the always strange skill of grabbing one ankle while upright and lifting it as high as is possible without diminishing reproductive viability, the gymnast discovers that he has stopped three inches short of his next launch pad, and he proceeds to earn my ridicule: he points his toes, extends his leg and daintily skips to where he needs to be, whirling his arms in what in some subcultures might be considered an extremely rude indication of how fat they mama is. This may happen two, even three times in a single routine, between breathtaking acts of gravitational defiance, and nine out of ten spectators would like to see it gone. But what if it actually has a function? What if those little hops, toes pointed like professor’s sarcasm, are in the routine to get the gymnast from A to B but also to give him a chance to breath in the interminable 60-90 seconds he spends on the mat, flipping himself into the various pretzel shapes usually reserved for Circque de Soleil employees? And what if the spectator needs that break as much as the gymnast?

Lately I find myself weighted by the density of the poetry that I am seeing written by my peers and in the books of poetry that I read. Little lead pellets roll from enjambed line to enjambed line or fall off the end: stop. A poem for children in Iraq, a poem for the Comfort women, a poem for the rape victim, and one moralizing against war/consumerism/conservativism/atheism/ votingfortheidiotBushism. And these are just the poems that I understand. Others are litanies of place names and theories and histories that don’t provide any historical facts and still others that can look like the poet had a bag of words into which he reached, grabbed a handful and flung them at a blank sheet. These are the flips. They are artful and stunning and well choreographed, and they wear me out. I think one has to be a practitioner of the art to truly understand how difficult it is to perform a poetic plank front flip into a backward somersault. But I find myself needing a break from the mental acrobatics of these works, and have nowhere to turn except to children’s literature, where light verse has been stashed for the duration of my short life.

If I want a poem that will make me laugh, or at the very least not make me want to disown everything I am as imperialist and right wing, I have to turn to Shel Silverstein or Roald Dahl or Ogden Nash, all of whom live in the youth section of bookstores and libraries, or on the shelves of my mother’s third grade classroom. The subject matter, yes, is often juvenile, but that is the audience that we have given to light verse poets. They are assigned illustrators and make more money than any “legitimate” poet by writing about homework and dirty socks. But my God, are their toes pointed! They use rhyme and meter and wit that are often wasted on their audience. This kind of wit and humor should not be relegated to the nursery, but should be embraced as welcome reprieve from the near-unbearable weight of sociopolitical treatises and unnaturing of nature. Good poets should be able to write light verse without anyone fearing for their talent, and should be able to publish poems that aren’t trying to explain or solve the problems of the world or the human race or even of one human’s existence because, in a troubled world, those poems that make us laugh can be every bit as valuable as those that make us weep.

A gymnast loses points if any part of his sculpted self touches the blue mat outside the white lines, and more than one has lost a medal because his thumb toe crossed or his top heavy torso tipped him out while he tried to set up his next sequence of earthbound acrobatics. The abdominal muscles may control the flips and the shoulders cushion the landing; the hands might elevate the body for those awe-inspiring flares that, by rights, belong on the pommel horse, and the thighs provide liftoff, but it is those pointed toes and little, dancing, strangely funny steps that keep the routine going, that are the taxiway between landing and takeoff. So let the man prance. Let light verse give the poetry reader a break between incredible works of heartbreaking genius. Let the poet/gymnast take a moment to breathe between triple back flips and power tumbling, without threat of sending him back to the YMCA gymnasium to coach summer camp. And let the world see him do it, because it makes us laugh.



Song of the Moment: "Don't Tread on Me" ~ Metallica