{"id":2862,"date":"2012-09-10T21:15:15","date_gmt":"2012-09-10T21:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/?p=2862"},"modified":"2023-08-05T15:09:45","modified_gmt":"2023-08-05T19:09:45","slug":"cheap-poetry-a-manifesto","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.davidwalbert.com\/dw\/2012\/09\/10\/cheap-poetry-a-manifesto\/","title":{"rendered":"Cheap poetry: A manifesto"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last Monday was my daughter’s birthday, and the Birthday Troll came again this year, in the night, to steal her presents, hide them in the woods, and leave riddles as clues to their whereabouts. He’s like Santa Claus for curmudgeons, and considerably more entertaining, not to mention one isn’t bound by the Byzantine mythology of popular culture and corporate marketing. The riddles are after the fashion of old English rhyming riddles, like the ones Bilbo Baggins traded with Gollum in the slimy dark under the Misty Mountains, and so I spend half of August looking at the stuff in my yard and woods through the eyes of a grumpy itinerant poet with a twisted sense of humor1<\/a><\/sup> and trying to find metaphor, simile, pun, any sort of literary device to obfuscate the quotidian.2<\/a><\/sup> <\/p>\n

The Troll’s verse ranges from <\/p>\n

Here beauty plays its many-colored song,
\nAnd while no notes may match, no note is wrong.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…which refers to the flower garden we planted to attract songbirds (in which was hidden an ocarina in the shape of a goldfinch); to <\/p>\n

Where spiders weave their webs and thrushes fly,
\nI, once proud and mighty, clutched the sky.
\nNow grubs and creepy crawlies gnaw my bones
\nAnd feed the birds that in me make their homes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

…which is the snag of a great dead white oak where woodpeckers nest. The Troll, you see, is a lover of nature, and he also has literary aspirations, hence his predilection for iambic pentameter and occasionally complex rhyming schemes, but he doesn’t take himself too seriously, and he occasionally succumbs to a bit of Hallmark-card gaiety. He’s thoughtful but wants to spread joy; he’s mischievous but basically harmless — deeply lovable, I think, and yet where would the poor guy find any love in these, dare I say at the risk of clich\u00e9, troubled times<\/em>? He’s an anachronism in our angry, literal, data-driven age. The anti-intellectual majority would think him elitist, yet he would never survive as an academic-professional poet. No wonder he’s a little grouchy.<\/p>\n

I had the Birthday Troll on my mind when I was perusing the \u201ccheap art\u201d table at the Paperhand Puppet Intervention<\/a> performance last weekend, with drawings, accessories, music, trinkets, and pottery made by the cast and band available for a small donation. Puppet pageants and cheap art go hand in hand; posters over the table displayed the \u201cWhy Cheap Art?\u201d Manifesto<\/a> written by Bread and Puppet nearly thirty years ago.<\/p>\n

The Birthday Troll, it struck me, writes cheap poetry<\/strong>. He shows up at someone’s house, looks at stuff they’ve seen a thousand times, and writes quick verses that make them see it through new eyes \u2014 that make them see the beauty in it, or the intrigue, or the connection to deeper or broader things, or simply make them laugh. (And if you can’t see it, then you can’t have your stuff. Hurrah!) We need more Birthday Trolls, I thought, and more cheap poetry.<\/p>\n

Your modern trolls, of course, don’t leave messages handwritten with a dip pen in green ink; they use Twitter. And so, I decided, I would use my mold-gathering Twitter account as it was originally meant to be used: to broadcast the irrelevant details of my day to people who have no sane reason to care \u2014 but to do so through verse<\/em>. Not, I insist, to use Twitter as a new medium for the creation of blah blah blah I’m so much smarter than you blah blah<\/em>. Not to write proper, respectable, or even good<\/em> poetry, although that may happen occasionally by accident. There is of course<\/em> a place in the world for really excellent poems to inspire and astonish us, but who will be inspired and astonished \u2014 or even read<\/em> the damn things \u2014 whose life is not filled with at least the building blocks of poetry, the playful language and the gleefully shifting perspectives? No \u2014 my purpose is only to write quick verse, light, spontaneous, largely unedited, mostly rhyming, to make something pretty or silly or thoughtful or absurd from the flotsam and jetsam of my day. <\/p>\n

Here’s the plan, then: I will tweet cheap poetry every day, and you can follow me at @djwalbert<\/a>. I’ll round it up here once a week on Cheap Poetry Tuesday. If anybody else wants to do the same, please join me. Maybe it will become a movement. If so, I give it a better chance of changing the world than the next election. <\/p>\n

Meanwhile, every movement needs a manifesto. And so, with apologies to Bread and Puppet and for the lack of inventive typography, I present<\/p>\n

the Why Cheap Poetry?<\/strong> manifesto<\/h2>\n

People have been thinking too long that poetry
\nis a privilege of the overeducated
\nand the therapy of the overwrought,
\nthat its place is in dusty volumes
\nand teenaged diaries.
\nPoetry is not to be analyzed!
\nPoetry is not to be scorned!
\nPoetry is for conversation, for saying
\ngood morning and good night.
\nPoetry is too important to be taken seriously,
\nand too serious to be made important.
\nPoetry is the breath of a culture,
\nthe dance of memory,
\nthe laughter of the world!
\nPoetry wakes us to wonder and absurdity!
\nPoetry destroys rigidity!
\nPoetry is grammar drunk on new wine!
\nPoetry is the voice of the soul
\nand it belongs to everybody!
\nPoetry is cheap!<\/strong>
\nHURRAH!<\/strong><\/p>\n

\n
<\/div>\n
    \n
  1. As opposed to my usual eyes. I admit it isn’t much of a stretch. ↵<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n
  2. \u201cObfuscate the quotidian\u201d being an example of the thing to which it refers. Is there a term for that? It’s like onomatopoeia, only different. ↵<\/a><\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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