Someone asks about influences, my favorite poets. I mention the usual suspects—Dickinson & Whitman, Frank O’Hara’s “Autobiographia Literaria,” Denise Duhamel & Dean Young. But it was comics—comedians—that hooked me on language.
When I was a kid my older brother would have to tag me along—mother’s orders. My brother had this friend; we would go to his house because he had one of those basements teenager’s dream of. Wall-to-wall carpets, cool posters, a Nerf hoop, wide-screen TV with Intellivision, beat-up bean bag chairs & a grungy oversized sectional sofa you could dive into. And the parents never came down. But most important was the record player & tape deck. I remember being swallowed up in a bean bag chair, totally mesmerized, listening to George Carlin’s A Place for My Stuff, Steve Martin’s A Wild and Crazy Guy, & this Richard Pryor cassette worn so thin the only way to rewind it was with a pencil by hand.
Even then, as a kid of 9 or 10, I sensed that what those comics were achieving had everything to do with structure. Like poetry, comedy is about timing—the ordering & strategic release of language within a form.
Because it’s related, I tell the story of Mr. C & The Little Jimmy Notebook. In 10th grade, a serious oversight by school administration allowed me & a handful of other extremely obnoxious trouble-making sophomores—sophomores who had no business being in the same class together—enroll in the same class: Mr. C’s “Creative Writing”. Little Jimmy was a boy we invented; basically he was a porn star with a retarded imagination. The Little Jimmy Notebook! We surreptitiously passed it back & forth, adding to & one-upping one another’s scenes with a ridiculousness borne of spectacular immaturity. One day when I was working on a story with a Christmas theme—something with a “Yule log”—Mr. C came up behind me & snatched the notebook from my desk.
While he read I imagined my imminent suspension, the phone call to my mother (my poor mother!), the cops, the FBI, the front-page of the local paper in all capital letters: “LOCAL IDIOT SHAMES TOWN”. Mr. C’s bald head turned red. He flipped the notebook back on my desk, then stood there considering what to do, a very long & pregnant pause where I felt doom & the blood pounding in my ears. Finally he said: “Well…At least you knuckleheads are writing.”
It was the best thing he could have done. He was right: we were writing. For most of us it was probably the first time since grade school that we’d written for our own pleasure & entertainment. I think of that day as a lesson in poetry—like the best comedy it should transgress, it should feel a little bit wrong & exciting like troublemaking, an arrow shot into the quotidian, something one does when one is expected to be elsewhere & doing something else.
