Current Issue: Fall/Winter 2011

Lyric Inspiration and Extreme Possibility  
Christopher Lirette

Don’t get me wrong: I do read poetry. I like cadences and zeugma and memorability and the weird way embodiment can be expressed by something so… unembodied. Do I feel like writing when I read a poem? Not particularly. So it’s hard to say that this famous poet or that modernist has influenced me.

I have stolen moves from poets. Syntax. Particular ways of meaning. When I first began writing, for instance, my poems were more or less D. A. Powell knockoffs: tragic images, couplets, some humor, and colons. When I teach creative writing, I’ll list other poets as influences, sure. I’m game. But when I come home from the university, do I sit in a room with poet-y light, reading through the collected Hart Crane for inspiration? Not a chance.

I put on The X-Files.

Maybe it’s something about the possibility of extreme possibility. Maybe it’s the lore and research that composes the poetics of an episode. It almost certainly has something to do with red hair and a scalpel. Whatever it is, The X-Files turns on the poetry miraculator. I don’t consider a poem done until at least one stanza leads to forgoing the light switch for a flashlight and a willingness to shoot whatever is lurking in the shadows.

And it’s not just The X-Files. I watch Buffy and Angel and Smallville. I go to the comic shop every Wednesday and spend all the money I’ve saved from academic desk copies on issues of Wonder Woman, Animal Man, and X-Men. I play Super Mario Brothers. I mark out every Monday for WWE Raw. I grew up with this kind of stuff, and that’s where I come home to. And you know what? I’m not ashamed.

Consider the episode “The Body” from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It proceeds through four acts that each begin with an overhead shot of the body. The first act, like many poems, deals with the myriad emotions sparked from the death of a love one, and plays out in a single long shot that stares at Buffy as she finds the body of her mother, giving a sense of both stasis and continual movement. This scene does a pretty good job of illustrating John Stuart Mill’s definition of poetry as “overheard,” because with the lack of alternating camera shots, the viewer is positioned as an onlooker in Buffy’s living room, creating a unique and unsettling personal invasion. In the course of the episode, there are scenes of negative imagery (showing Buffy saving her mother), ellipsis (not showing what Buffy says to her sister when she pulls her out of class to tell her their mother is dead), repetition (the body), and surprising imagery (the hiked up skirt on the body, a kiss between two lovers, an attention to banality in the face of loss). Also, there is no music in the episode, forcing emotion to come from the images and dialogue.

OK, you’re saying, so he can use the tools of poetry to analyze a TV show. Big deal.

For me though, it’s not only about using sophisticated methods to tug at the heart strings. It’s also the fact that the show has vampires. That it’s set in a town built over one of the gates to Hell. That there’s a good deal of kung fu fighting involved. The show combines two things for me that make it work for my own work: the reliance on image, narrative, and metaphor to produce feelings, and the fact that it uses fantasy as the premise.

We want great poetry to be universal, right? What’s more universal than the fact that we’re still concerned about the same things, the same tragedies and triumphs, when we have to deal with fighting demons? Or when we’re a few thousand years from now and on a spaceship? We can take all the frills and contexts and whatever and throw it away and the good stuff will always be about the same things: that one day, our bodies will die and be put away, and we really don’t want that to be the end but it might be; that we yearn for one another and really can’t make it through without each other; that glory comes at a price no matter what your sport—basically, that it’s hard, but also kind of great, to be human.

I could list “universal” themes in fantasy texts all day because there’s really an inexhaustible supply of things that we deal with in our lives. That they dealt with in Shakespeare’s time. That people in fantasy universes and in other galaxies deal with. These texts use the external context of a made-up world to create a space where the truths of our own lives are played out.

Lots of contemporary poetry does the same thing, by the way.

For me, though, I need the idiom of my time, and I’m sorry to say, especially because I do want to read awesome new poems and for others to read my work, but for the most part, that idiom is not poetry. I wasn’t reading Frank Bidart and Anne Sexton when I was 8, for instance. It wasn’t until I was 18 or so that I began to really read poetry that could move me. The poetry I was drawn to, as well, reflected some of the same things I like about certain pop cultural texts—the theatricality, the internal horror and conflict, etc. And my students generally react the same way to Bidart’s “Ellen West” as they do when they watch “The Body.” But in the end, pop culture has shaped my life more than high culture has.

Furthermore, I need the distance of fantasy to look at my own life. Because if I sit around and contemplate my four hour commute, the rising price of bacon at the grocery store, and juggling things like debts and illnesses, then I might not get around to writing anything at all. I’ll be thinking of how to get the next paycheck instead, thank you. If I have to read some mopey poetry in that time, then you can be certain to find me cleaning the house and writing a job letter.

Plop me in front of the TV, however, and let me be someone else whose everyday life is full of conspiracy and apocalypse. Then I can get somewhere. I can distort my own life into fantasy and metaphor and parataxis until my life no longer resembles what I’m actually doing when I’m living. Then my writing can look like something whose homeworld was destroyed, something that can phase through walls. The texts I like—and they’re all superhero/heroine tales—reflect us as the best versions of ourselves, and it’s a comfort that even at our best, we’re still solving the same mysteries—and having a great time doing it. And so when I write, I want to write the poetry that’s in the company of Dana Scully, Joss Whedon, “The Heartbreak Kid” Shawn Michaels, or Alan More, something that’s a work of the imagination in the most fun sense of the word, something that I would like to believe in.

 

Christopher Lirette originally from Chauvin, Louisiana, lives with his wife, Linda, in Newark, New Jersey. His poetry appears in The Southern Review, PANK, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and The Colorado Review and earned him a Fulbright Grant in 2007. He also has an essay on professional wrestling in The Louisville Review. In addition to writing, he has worked as an offshore roustabout, an archery instructor, and a personal chef. During the school year, he commutes to Ithaca, NY to teach courses on poetry, superheroines, and hip-hop.