More notes from the Dodge Poetry Festival

Before we get to the notes you’ve awaited with such patience, let me get something off my chest. If Curious George was my monkey, I would have kicked his ass long ago. Every friggin day it’s something. He’s constantly screwing something up because he’s so-called curious, and when he walks away scot-free, the man in the yellow hat blissfully ignorant of the path of destruction in George’s wake, he leaves a boatload of clean-up or repair work for some low-level employee of a department store or park service. I guess their lives don’t much matter in George’s narcissistic little universe.

Actually, the being who deserves the beating is the man in the yellow hat, the enabler, the “parent” who is so caught up in his own petty little pleasures – like taking a moth census in front of a camping lantern – that he pays not a scintilla of attention to the misdoings of his little George. I long for the episode in which a class action suit is brought against the man in the yellow hat for damages related to George’s vandalism against everything in the cartoon universe.

Can we tie this into the Dodge? Of course we can. Here’s how:

Anticipating the question that must be asked frequently of any creative mind, Billy Collins spoke of his influences. It’s probably safe to say that most people think the answer to such a question – who are your influences – will consist of names who have created in a similar vein, in this case, poets. But Billy Collins isn’t your mundane speaker, so he listed two influences, one which isn’t surprising, and one which, if you think about it, also isn’t surprising.

The envelope, please. The winners are: Ernest Hemingway, and Looney Tunes cartoons. Hemingway is sort of obvious. You can tell that Collins likes sentences, and you notice that his sentences rely much more on specific nouns and verbs for description than on adjectives or adverbs, and that his style is free of showing off his command of sentence structure. Would that I were so able.

The Looney Tunes influence seems sort of inevitable as well. Not only did the Bugs Bunny cartoons offer a certain kind of literary sensibility (no, seriously), but they also allow poems to do things that prose can’t. Whether it’s the Road Runner smooshing Wile E. Coyote with an anvil every week, or Kenny somehow meeting his maker at the same interval, the cartoon universe provides possibilities that allow us the kinds of do-overs that enable us to reconsider the reality of reality. Do I sound way too pompous or look-how-abstract-I-am in that sentence? When I spend time with my creative writing class looking at magic realism in Kafka and Borges, couldn’t I achieve the same effect by watching Bugs?

If you were to go back to the Genesis of my blog (how’s that for self-serving hyperbole?) – of course I’m not asking you to actually do such a thing – you’d see that I’m not a huge fan of using video games and other pop culture pursuits in formal instruction. But I always enjoyed Saturday and Sunday mornings with Mel Blanc. Maybe I can be a poet someday too.

Still to come:
“So, what was Emily Dickinson trying to say in this poem?”
Tony Hoagland