Sunday, March 4, 2007

The Ballad of Eskimo Nell

As part of "Freedom to Read Week," last Thursday I attended a reading downtown. At a bar afterwards, a few of us were talking about book banning, censorship, etc.

I've never experienced anything so dramatic as outright censorship myself, but I have felt pressure at times to read material that is "suitable." I've had reading hosts advise me, after I'd read poems with foul language in them, that next time I might pick different poems, as some members of the series' regular audience might not have approved of my diction. And when my chapbook Fool's Errand was published in the spring of 2004 by Saturday Morning Chapbooks in PEI, I went to the Island for the launch. Prior to the launch, I was interviewed for the CBC's local afternoon show. The host asked me, during the course of the interview, to read a poem from the chapbook. I chose the title poem, mainly because it was one of the best pieces in the book--not thinking that its subject matter (dogs fucking) might be contraversial. At the end of the interview, the host asked me if I wouldn't mind reading just one more poem, at which point I started to suspect something. And sure enough, in the edited interview broadcast that afternoon, "Fool's Errand," a poem with no four letter words but with some hot dog-on-dog action, was cut.

The CBC is generally pretty bad about this kind of thing. When I was in Saskatoon on my book tour last winter, I met Holly Luhning, who was competing in the CBC Poetry Faceoff in Regina, and was told by the local producer that she couldn't use the word "vulva" in her poem. She agonised over this some, but decided to leave it in and read it anyway. When the poem was broadcast, the offending word was bleeped. Now, I might concede that CBC had a valid objection if she had used the term cunt, or even pussy [that should spike traffic on the site!], but Ch-ee-rist, vulva is an anatomical term! And the CBC has plenty of daytime programming with more contraversial content than this. Why can you have something in a drama, but not in a poem? I guess poetry's supposed to be genteel...

The previous year, 2005, I'd been invited to take part in the Faceoff. I accepted, even though I had serious concerns about the rules against bad language and sexually explicit content. Every year, the Faceoff has a theme, to which the competing poets must write an original poem. The theme in 2005 was "play." So I decided to play a game with my poem. Here it is:

GAME


It happens maybe once in a lifetime,

Happens with the caustic burn of quicklime,
A
nd when it happens, you won’t have a clue—
V
ery little at least—why it was you
E
xempted from verse’s struggle in vain,

Not someone else. Your taut portraits of pain?
O
r was it all the long hours of study,

Fiddling with syllables in the ruddy
U
nbaffled glow of a beeswax candle,
C
ursing your abject failure to handle
K
indled verbs, adjectives, improper nouns
I
n your too-proper paws—no ups, all downs,
N
o mercy, just grief dogging your black pen’s
G
ouge across page after page, whats and whens

Inked in, crossed out, those crucial hows and whys
D
im in your mind at best. If you were wise,
E
very false step would bring you closer to
A
rriving at the conclusion that you

Weren’t fit to play this kind of idle game,
H
eaping lines in a twisted, crooked, lame
A
crostic code—but wisdom doesn’t come
T
o lovers, lunatics, poets. The sum

Total of your fraught work is a big fat
O
, a totem pole of bent beasts. So what?

Write it anyway. If all the world’s a page,
R
ip it out. Start clean. Ex nihilo, rage
I
nside that tight white frame, engage the pain
T
hat cripples most to strut you over plains
E
rupt in flame, corrupt with shame, on stilts

Five feet above the bluish air that wilts
O
zone-smothered poets, pets and flowers.
R
ip it out again. One line might take hours

To justify its life from all the dreck
H
arboured by your draft like sharks in a wrecked
E
mpty vessel that just circle, circle,

Circle, waiting inside their nautical
B
reakfast nook for unsuspecting divers
C
ombing the site for florins and stivers.

Pace most poets, poetry’s a game
O
f chance that can’t be learned or rendered tame—
E
xcept if you play it by a set of rules.
T
hen you may pen lines to please the smug fools
R
unning the magazines, teaching in schools,
Y
earning to make friends, longing to belong,

Fit in, be cool—but such lines won’t last long,
A
float like flies on a pond full of fish.
C
up a hand to ear for the whoosh, splash, splish
E
fflorescing the stagnant pondwater’s
O
range face, rejoice in the small slaughters
F
illing the gullets of salmon and trout.
F
eed on it. And don’t for a second doubt

Brutality’s claim to beauty and truth—
U
nless the law of a tooth for a tooth
T
urns your sensitive lily-white stomach,

In which case, get thee to yon wee hummock
T
o record sweet lines on bee and butterfly’s

Mating dance, or any other white lies
U
psetting to no one. You’ll make more friends
S
pouting liqueur than logging the quick ends
T
hat animals suffer— But that is not

How this game is played. In case you forgot
A
llegiance is due to none but the Muse;
V
erily, verily, life’s but a ruse
E
nding in death: the loyal worker bee’s

Stinger embedded in flesh, apiary’s
O
verflowing culmination in swarm,
M
onarchs frozen in millions seeking warm
E
mpires south of the snow— Verse is a game
T
hat we play for keeps, no sanction for shame,
H
urt feelings or sleep. Like Dante, descend
I
nto hell. You may bring with you one friend,
N
o more, so choose well from the queued-up dead
G
roaning past on a belt of smelted lead

Trays. Keep your head. Let your eyes needle out
O
ver featureless waste. Accommodate doubt.

Doubt is the only sure sign you’re alive,
O
ne length ahead of the bees in the hive

Worried about their health plans and pensions,
I
ncome tax, mortgage debt, hypertension.
T
his dead pledge to the devil ends when paid,
H
eaves its last sigh when the last card’s been played,

Played, played in multiple takes, bread and wine
L
aid out for your mourners to snack on—thine
A
llowance of grace, Muse, nickel and dime;
Y
et it made me a rich man once in this lifetime.

***

When I submitted my draft to the CBC Halifax producer, I hid the acrostic by not capping and bolding it and by deleting all the stanza breaks. At the live event, however, I passed out photocopies of the poem, with the acrostic in plain sight, to members of the audience. The producer approached me and said, "Can you do that?" I told her I wasn't sure, but I could check the contract--which I knew full well said nothing about providing the text of the poem to the audience. No one listening to the poem on the radio would have the slightest clue about my little game, but it felt good to pull a fast one on the Corp.--and get paid to do it! The producer also didn't appear to get the poem's not-so-subtextual mockery of the idea of writing a poem for pay.

I'd like to leave you with a poem whose offensiveness is much less subtle: one of my favourite pieces of anonymous doggerel, "The Ballad of Eskimo Nell," which really takes the piss out of Robert Service, in a loving sort of way. Well, maybe loving ain't the mot juste... Here's the text. And here's the audio.

2 comments:

Megan said...

Heh.

They bleeped "vulva"??? Sheesh.

Zachariah Wells said...

Yup. They're a bunch of stunned cunts.