Sam Savage: The Criminal Life of Effie O

Illustrated poem, novel-in-verse, Sam Savage has written a children’s book for adults.  With simple, deft verse he sketched out characters readers can really care about.

***

In his introduction to The Criminal Life of Effie O, Sam Savage (a.k.a. The Old Rat) explains that he wanted to write a children’s book for his kids, but they grew up. This hilarious and touching illustrated novel-in-verse is what he wrote instead.  It is composed in rhyme by a skillful hand, and illustrated with charming line drawings by Virginia Beverley. 

As is the case in folk tales and children’s stories, simple shorthand is employed.  Substitute “suburbs” for “dark woods” and “the city” for “the enchanted castle.” This urban/suburban, good/bad equation is employed without comment. For his purposes Savage needs “Wal-Mart,” “subdivision” and assorted familiars to stand in for the stultifying malaise that often overcomes relationships, and individuals.

He might even say that “suburbs” have happened to both of Savage’s main characters. The eponymous Effie O is the love child souvenir of her mother Janet’s wide-ranging youth. Janet settled down from life on the road in order to raise and support Effie, yet 15 years later neither are happy with the life stability and prosperity has brought. Janet expresses her frustration in overwork and alcohol. Effie takes hers out on walls, benches, toilet stalls, and anything else she can hit with a can of spray paint.  Effie steals to support her graffiti habit, and is caught. 

In this selection, Child Psychologist Dr. Zell and Effie have an encounter.

After a dis-

harmonious hour

with Effie in his office,

Zell has a diagnosis

of the odd moroseness

that has her lately

so peaked and pasty.

*

He asked her questions (pried)

and Effie answered (lied).

*

He knew that she was lying.

She knew what he was trying. (1)

From therapist’s office Effie’s story careens through DSS, the courts, and eventually a juvenile correctional facility. Janet is having her own problems both at work and in the gated community where her how-did-I-end-up-here-from-where-I-started mid-life crisis is putting her at odds with the status quo. 

While in real life these events would be troubling, in the hands of a wise and benevolent poet this is the thread from which an uplifting story is woven. Savage understands and respects both troubled youth and middle-aged bureaucrat. He even issues an apology to hard-working teachers and social workers who might feel insulted by their analogs in the book. One comes away from The Criminal Life of Effie O with renewed compassion for self and others.  Well done.

1) Savage, Sam. The Criminal Life of Effie O. (Madison: Papas and Nellie Press. 2005.) 75-76.

For more information about illustration of poetry, image in poetry, and other related topics, please visit my articles on Journal: the short life and mysterious death of Amy Zoe Mason, Illustrated Poetry, and Janet Holmes' The Green Tuxedo.

Which Book Would You Buy Based on Title Alone?

Of the five poetry books in our selection, which would you buy on title alone? The final vote numbers are as follows:

The Lost Lunar Baedeker (21.43%) by Mina Loy

To Repel Ghosts (28.57%) by Kevin Young

Nights of Fire, Nights of Rain (35.71%) by Amy Uyematsu

The Flute Ship Castricum (14.29%) by Amy England

The Book of Orgasms (0.00%) by Nin Andrews

Poor Nin Andrews lost out. I recall The Book of Orgasms as funny and far, far better that I feared it might be, given the over-ambitious title.

Follow up thoughts: Does your vote change when you consider the authors? Number of pages? Price?

Biography and Lying in Poetry

Where is the dividing line between “cultivated narratives,” and those which simply grow up wild and organic from the lives of their creators?

There is still another kind of linking narrative which we haven’t discussed yet.  It is the inadvertent one, the one which corresponds most closely to prose biography. I know, I know, this sounds like I’m talking about confessional poetry again, and perhaps I have come full circle from my original argument. 

Enter David Weigl, who in book after book returns to the jungles of Southeast Asia.

A bouncing betty comes up waist high –
cuts you in half.
One man’s legs were laid
alongside him in the Dustoff:
he asked for a chairback, morphine.
He screamed he wanted to give
his eyes away, his kidneys,
his heart.... (1)

Weigl does not abandon his readers in Vietnam, though. His many books have given him time (his first was published in 1976) and pages enough to explore different chapters of life – marriage, parenting, spirituality, and recovery. 

Note how the voice in this piece based on childhood, 

Mr. Brown

            was my teacher

of the sums in the sixth grade

and he saw the beautiful

figures in everything.  (2)

differs from this, in which a man looks back on the years since childhood:

All morning long in the rain,

            I drove through the street of my boyhood

past the falling-down houses,

with my friend from my boyhood

            who is a man now, like me. (3)

The nature of how poets write when they’re writing their own lives -- and poets are always writing their own lives, even when they costume it in fiction -- leads poets to create unintentional narratives.

In Bruce Weigl’s thirteen books he has returned again and again to American soldiers in Vietnam, but also spends lots of time with the Vietnamese people themselves, as well as with American veterans at home. The whole of his work taken together weaves a life story, just as volumes of a private journal or a stack of personal letters would. Weigl has said in interviews that not everything in his poems happened exactly the way it was written, that imagination has altered the way he has written events.(4) Even so, if it were prose we would call it biography.

So, where is the dividing line between intentional linking narratives – “cultivated narratives,” -- and those which simply grow up wild and organic from the lives of their creators? 

1. Weigl, Bruce. Executioner. (Small Press Distribution: Berkeley. 1976.)

2. Weigl, Bruce. The Unraveling Strangeness. (Grove Press: New York, 2002) 28.

3. Weigl, Bruce. The Unraveling Strangeness. (Grove Press: New York, 2002) 37.
4. Dameshek, Brandon, "An Interviews with Bruce Weigl," Memorious: A Forum for New Verse and Poetics, Issue No. 2, July 2004, 3 May 2006. http://memorious.org/?id=58.

Ann Carson's Autobiography of Red

Q: In her novel-in-verse, Autobiography of Red, why has Anne Carson harnessed creatures from Ancient Greece to tell a story of adolescent love in modern Canada?

 

A careful reader may have noticed that none of the books we’re using in this series is set in the present moment.  Even Ultima Thule in which Davis McCombs introduces a second, contemporary speaker late in the book, he still uses a speaker from the mid-nineteenth century for the main narrative. 

By contrast, Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red uses Geryon and Herakles as a romantic pair of teenagers in contemporary Canada.  Here is a bit of the backstory: Young Geryon discovers his older brother masturbating in the bunk below:

Why do you pull on your stick?

Geryon asked. None of your business let’s see yours, said his brother.

No.

Bet you don’t have one. Geryon checked. Yes I do.

You’re so ugly I bet it fell off.

Geryon remained silent.  He knew the difference between facts and brother hatred.(1)

Several questions come to mind.

• Why has Anne Carson taken on creatures with such gravitas, and then let their story unfold through the most mundane events? 
• Has Carson wasted the archetypal potential of these Greek mythological characters?
• Using the guise of a red chthonic creature with wings, is Carson writing about her own life?

Perhaps the last question should be, “how does using the guise of a winged red creature help Carson write about the life she knows?” We will discuss a poet’s way of knowing in a subsequent article, but for now let’s focus on how Carson’s story is shaded by the use of Geryon. Many have argued that this technique only appropriates gravitas otherwise unearned by actors who, in this case, spend a good deal of time squabbling and necking in cafés.

Another interpretation, however, is that Carson is making creative use of a template. By employing characters we already know, she is free to tell her story without the clutter of lengthy dissertations on Eros and Thanatos and the seductiveness of beautiful destroyers. Upon this prepared emotional field, Carson is free to overlay a nuanced narrative about gay youth, the explorations of love, relationships with eccentric but loving parents, and the symbiotic nature of art in life.

Exercise: Think about your most recent poem.  Consider what historical or mythological figure might represent the speaker and others in the poem. If you make these substitutions, how does your poem feel/mean something different?

1. Carson, Anne. Autobiography of Red. Vintage Books: New York. 1998.

Verse Novel Beginnings IV: Davis McCombs and Ultima Thule

It is an accepted tenet in poetry circles today that each poem must be self-contained; the inclusion of notes or other background information is widely considered tacky. In Ultima Thule, however, poet Davis McCombs creates a delicate and sophisticated novel-in-verse by breaking the rule that says poems should be unnoted and self-contained.

We previously discussed how in The Descent of Alette, Louise in Love and Fredy Neptune nothing is explained prior to their first line of poetry. Now let us look at a book in which the other road is taken. In his Yale Series of Younger Poets winning book, Ultima Thule, , Davis McCombs seems intent upon giving the reader adequate background knowledge before letting them see the first poem. With good reason, as the first poem, “Candlewriting,” seems nicely composed but tepid when read “clean”:

I remember the wind and how the sounds
it carried were my name, meant me, Stephen…
called out over the cornfield where I hid.
there was no sound when candlesmoke
met limestone – just this: seven characters
I learned to write with a taper on a stick. (1)

At first reading one might picture a contemporary youth, hiding from his mother in the fields near his home, and graffitiing his name on the walls of a nearby cave. Upon returning to the front material of the book, however, which includes a lengthy forward, a brief biography of the main character, a list of sources, and an 1845 map of Stephen Bishop’s explorations into Mammoth Caves, one rereads the poem with more appreciation.

The main speaker throughout the book is the mapmaker and explorer Stephen Bishop, who lived from about 1820 to 1847. He was the slave of Dr. John Croghan, owner of Mammoth Caves for a decade prior to the American Civil War. For his explorations of the cave complex Bishop enjoyed world-wide fame through newspaper articles and books. (2)

Given this new information one understands that the person calling out to the boy across the cornfield was not necessarily his mother, but the Doctor or perhaps a member of the household staff. The sound of his name carrying out across the sheltering cornfield suddenly takes on a different tenor. With the timeline adjusted, we have to acknowledge a wild and frontier-style Kentucky, which would have only been a state for about 18 years at the time of Bishop’s birth.

Wealthy guests paid Bishop to guide them through the caverns. The forward tells us that Bishop learned to write by smoking their names into ceilings of the cave. Readers can no longer imagine a bored boy smudging his own name on a wall.

Social and legal status, economic status, and a host of other issues are just as much a part of this poem as the poetry itself. Instead of trying to weave these things into the text, McCombs elected to supply preparatory information in the front material of the book. Without having to weight the introductory poems with information, he was free to write a far more delicate and suggestive first poem than would have been possible otherwise.

Exercise: Write four lines about a historical figure of your choice, including as much information on their life as you can. Write four lines about the same person, assuming your reader already knows all the important facts of the historical figure’s life. What do you include in the poem when the data are omitted?

1. McCombs, Davis.Ultima Thule.Yale University Press. 2000. p.3.
ibid., x.

Article first published in Suite 101 as: Beginnings IV: Davis McCombs and Ultima Thule.

Writing the Verse Novel: Setting Your Scene

Poets Alice Notley and Ellen Bryant Voigt make us live their works, but how? Let’s face it; a book length poem is daunting.

It’s more frightening still if scanning the page you come across the voices of people you don’t know, events and objects you’ve not been introduced to. How does an accomplished poet overcome this, so that the reader easily slips into the time and place intended? 

Alice Notley apparently doesn’t worry about this problem.  Witness how she begins, The Descent of Alette without prelude or note: 

“One day, I awoke” “& found myself on” “a subway, endlessly”

“I didn’t know” “how I’d arrived there or” “who I was” “exactly”

“Great,” we may think, “even Notley doesn’t know who the speaker is.” She’s pulled a smart trick, though: If the speaker doesn’t know her own identity she must begin a process of discovery. Her surroundings and history will be revealed to us readers as they are revealed to her.  The effect is simple and so complete that we won’t even notice as scene and character information is delivered to us, slowly, as we read.  (1)

To be honest, Alice Notley does include a preliminary note about her use of all those quotation marks, but nothing about Alette or her subterranean world.  We’ll talk further about those quotation marks and other intriguing formal techniques in a couple of weeks.

In the meantime, let’s look at Kyrie, a narrative told in a series of sonnets by Ellen Bryant Voigt.  In Kyrie, Voigt takes care of scene set-up by including a two-line mention of the 1918 epidemic from a history text.

Following two pages later she inserts the prologue, which is, in fact, an eight-line poem. It describes the world after the pandemic has come and gone, in lines that echo Walt Whitman:

After the first year, weeds and scrub;

after five, juniper and birch,

….

who can tell us where there was an orchard,

where a swing, where the smokehouse stood? (2)

Voigt began the timeline of her narrative two pages later, with the first poem of the sequence:

All ears, nose, tongue and gut,

dogs know if something’s wrong;

….

Outside, the vacant yard: then,

within minutes something eats the sun. (3)

Next article: We will continue this discussion of beginnings, featuring two gritty narratives from the dramatic side of the poetic spectrum.

Exercise 1: Write four lines of poetry to deliver information, as in Voigt’s prologue. First make sure your prologue works as poetry. Remember: The human brain is designed to find pattern in chaos, so don’t feel compelled to over explain.

Exercise 2:  Devise a scenario in which information can be delivered without prologue or notes, as in Notley.  Write four lines following that scenario.

1. Notley, Alice.  The Descent of Alette.  New York: Penguin Books. 1992. 3.

2. Voight, Ellen Bryant.  Kyrie.  New York:  W.W. Norton and Company.  1995. 11.
3. ibid., 15.

Article first published at Suite 101.com

The Way-Back Machine -- Where and How to Begin a Book-Length Narrative

The entry piece to a book-length narrative poem holds even more importance than it would in a general collection.  Mary Jo Bang and Ruth Whitman share a technique.

The intro must funnel the reader directly into the scene of, let’s say, 18^th century Russia.  Let’s be more specific and say that the entire narrative takes place in the home of the smartest and most devoted of Count Tolstoy’s serfs.  How confusing to the reader that first poem will be -- involving scythes, rye, 20 versts and a glass of kvass -- unless the mental stage has already been set.

A novel like Moby Dick can afford to take a leisurely chapter or two if need be to explain a socio-economic situation, a political situation, the geography, climate and dominant religious beliefs of the time and place.  A prose piece also has the advantage of being able to use journalistic directness when necessary.  On the other hand, poetry’s very nature is sleight of hand -- saying one thing which leads the reader to understand another, greater thing which is unsayable. Even a prose poem embodies the kind of boiled-down structure that precludes lengthy explanation. How then can a poem set its stage without becoming, well, prose?

Poets often use what screenwriters call “the way-back machine.”  This device opens with the end of the timeline and then jumps back to the beginning. The first poem of a book is set at the end, or perhaps after the end of the story, while the second poem returns to the beginning.  Mary Jo Bang’s Louise in Love, for example, begins with the poem, “Eclipsed,” which happens as the story closes:

It is, she said, so over.  But it wasn’t.

Specters they would be

rooted eighty-two years in the same spot waiting

… and one by one

(which is the way death takes us, he said)

they took their shadows

and went out of the garden and into the house.  [i]

Without sacrificing the beauty of the piece, Bang has deftly showed her readers whom they will be reading about, and when the action takes place. With the work of the way-back machine complete, the story begins in the second poem, “She Couldn’t Sing At All, At All.”

The way-back machine was also put to good use by Ruth Whitman in her book, Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey.  Her first poem begins with the ghostly voice of her dead narrator opening the tale: 

how could I foresee my end

in that soft Illinois spring?

I began my journey certain

that what was unknown

would be made smooth and easy

I forgot the anger of the land[ii]

The next poem, “April 15, 1846, leaving Springfield, Illinois” then loops back to the beginning of the timeline to start the action:

the wagons move first,

one directly behind the other[iii]

By letting the dead Tamsen Donner speak in the first undated poem, Ruth Whitman has effectively placed her narrator outside of her own timeline, acting as much a voice of our own moment as one of the 19^th century. 

Exercise: Imagine you find an old journal while renovating your home. Did it belong to a construction worker, the house’s original owner, a real estate agent, or someone else?

Write four lines of poetry in the voice of the journal writer.

Write four more lines, set 15 years earlier than the first.

Write four lines in your own voice, in which you speak of finding the journal.

---

[i] Mary Jo Bang.  Louise in Love.  New York, NY: Grove Press, 2001. 3.

[ii] Ruth Whitman. Tamsen Donner: A Woman’s Journey. Farmington, ME: Alice James Books, 1977. 15.

[iii] ibid., 19.

(This article first appeared in Suite 101.)