What to Do if You Are an Enigmatic Poet Laureate with Writer’s Block Who Has Been Asked to Speak at a Private School’s Commencement

What to Do if You Are an Enigmatic Poet Laureate with Writer’s Block Who Has Been Asked to Speak at a Private School’s Commencement
by Jeff Lewis

Even with the best of intentions, things go poorly. Take, for example, this essay. It began months ago when I awoke from a dream in which I was the poet laureate of Santa Monica and I was unprepared to give a commencement speech before the graduating class of Walter and Melinda Reed-Gates High School. My dreamy solution to this problem, which I jotted down on a bedside pad of paper, involved giving each student a dirty carrot and making them form a smiley-winky emoticon with their bodies. This is all that was salvageable of a couple hours of work:

Stop at a grocery store and buy some peeled baby carrots, a pearl onion and a stock of celery. Place the vegetables in a hat box. If you don’t have a hat box, a shoe box will do, or even one of those purple-and-gold felt socks that come with Chivas Regal bottles.

Fill the box with dirt and bury it. After a few minutes, dig up the box and empty out the dirt, leaving only the carrots, onion and celery. Do not get dirty while doing this.

When I typed out my rambling prose on the computer, I noticed something. It sucked. To punch it up, I decided to add a superfluous passage on jean shorts. This, too, was junk, but I still feel compelled to share the image that inspired it:

I should mention this: don't wear jeans shorts.

On another pass through the essay, I added a little back story to the poet's life. This became odder than the dirty carrots, and I couldn't even blame it on a dream. This passage was thought out rationally and methodically, drawing extensively on my advanced history degree. I even thumbed through my copy of Catherine Albanese's America: Religions and Religion.

When I was 18, I read a pamphlet at my neighborhood Swedenborgian church, hailing the 19th century exploits of John Chapman, AKA Johnny Appleseed, who I like to call Johnny Applepip.

Mr. Chapman, if you don’t know the story, traveled around Ohio—then on the frontier—back in the early 19th century, selling apple seedlings and proselytizing the Word of Emanuel Swedenborg. The particulars aren’t important, just the fact that he had a twin calling: apples and God.

The pamphlet contained a bunch of hogwash about New Age spirituality and apple seedlings which, because my teenage mind was—like your own—not fully formed, inspired me to move to Sweden and, in a pointless gesture, roam the land like Johnny Applepip, paying tribute to recently retired tennis sensation Björn Borg by putting on tennis clinics in little villages.

I also handed out carrots, which the Swedes enjoyed more than my tennis clinics.

I also considered clothing the protagonist solely in headbands, but then decided that was logistically impossible in Sweden. Believing my essay now to be pure dada, I added this bit:

Let me pause now to make this wish: I wish the woman on the left were wearing an off-white linen suit with a linen tie of the same color, so that she reminded one of a darker-haired Marlene Dietrich. I wish the woman on the right was wearing a mariachi outfit with green silk lapels and red pepper-shaped buttons.

When this didn't help matters, I considered creating a picture sudoku where the numbers would be replaced by pictures of nine different apples—golden delicious, granny smith, fuji, pippin, crab, etc. The problem is, that's really time consuming. Plus, it's really hard to tell the difference between a granny smith and a pippin in the grocery store, let alone in a centimeter-square drawing of one.

I was stuck, so I tried to suck it up and power through, adding an additional character to the narrative:

During my travels through Sweden, I inadvertently crossed into Finland, where my tennis ball charade lacked cultural resonance. Then a petulant artist, I believed that my trespass into Finland violated the integrity of the Sweden-Borg exercise and so I refused to return to Sweden once I noticed my error. Instead, I found work at a lakeside inn, whose proprietress was notable in several ways. For one, she could separate the yolks from the whites in one hand, in the dark, which is very useful when making puff pastry during the winter at 72 degrees latitude.

Also, she was a member of the only Finnish family never to use the letter K in a first name, middle name or surname. Even with nicknames and maiden names, the family held the line. This caused her great sorrow because family tradition dictated that she could never wed her soul mate, Mikka Hakkanen, who lived far away in Calgary.

Finally, I got to thinking, "What is the purpose of this essay?" The answer: to help a poet in distress. The solution: Poetry CreatOR, the poetry generation program created by Erik Sincoff, Darren Nicholson and Jeff Lewis, AKA me, in the late 1980s. It is a service that will semi-randomly generate a poem for you if you are in a pinch and need a classy poem. Here’s an example:

Ode to the Smiley Winker

Smiley Winker was hunted, but he wasn't found,
Breakwater so sound of mind not free to persuade,
Continuing out, into the distance, the automobile slams.
He was descending himself--he had no choice.

He was really really dull.
Eroticness washed over he like a listless tulip,
Diving in a lake of drear, the semicolon-parens found a golden snail.
He tossed and turned, his warm neck flapping uselessly,
"Disregard!" baaed the delighted man, the keeper of Smiley Winkers.

I don't know if this salvaged the essay, but if not, here is a sea gull:

Jeff can be reached at jeff@babblog.com.