September 22: Parsley and Paprika, Serial Killer, Gulags

The adulation that Trout was receiving, mindless and illiterate as it was, affected Trout like marijuana.  He was happy and loud and impudent.

"I'm afraid I don't read as much as I ought to," said Maggie.

"We're all afraid of something," Trout replied.  "I'm afraid of cancer and rats and Doberman pinschers."

"I should know, but I don't, so I have to ask," said Maggie, "what's the most famous thing you ever wrote?"

"It was about a funeral for a great French chef."

"That sounds interesting."

"All the great chefs in the world are there.  It's a beautiful ceremony."  Trout was making this up as he went along.  "Just before the casket is closed, the mourners sprinkle parsley and paprika on the deceased."  So it goes.

Okay, this passage is funny.  A very unfamous writer telling a really good lie to an unsuspecting guest at Billy's dinner party.  It's the perfect situation for someone with creative aspirations.  Everybody thinks Trout is a famous writer.  Of course, none of the people present are readers, so Trout can tell as many whoppers about himself as he wants.  He could be a Nobel Prize-winning science fiction author if the mood hits him.

Being introduced as a writer at a party of non-readers is weird.  I've been in that position many times.  There's a certain amount of expectation that comes with the title.  I've been introduced as a writer and poet and, recently, Poet Laureate at public events.  If I'm introduced as a writer, the first question, usually, is something like, "Oh, what have you written?"  If I'm introduced as a poet, the first comment is usually something like, "Oh . . . I read Robert Frost once," followed by a halfhearted attempt to recite "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."  And if I'm introduced as the current Poet Laureate of the Upper Peninsula, the first reaction is usually an appropriate "Ooooh" of feigned admiration, followed by a hasty retreat to someone with a safer occupation, like a serial killer or Central American dictator.

Poetry is not safe.  Too many people have been tortured with poetry by English teachers in school.  Forced to write explications of Poe's "The Raven" or Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  Graded on memorized recitations of Frost's "Mending Wall" or Robinson's "Richard Cory."  Only other poets feel comfortable around poets.  It's a small, insular tribe.

I find it much easier to introduce myself as a college professor.  (Not English professor--that profession is also suspect.)  Being a teacher is a somewhat respectable profession.  Enlightening young minds and all that.  Poets work alone, writing things that nobody understands or reads.  Poets are alcoholics.  Mentally ill.  Homosexual.  They don't hold steady jobs and are probably communists, plotting to overthrow the government.  Basically, poets are anything that is categorized as "other."  That's why so many poets found themselves in gulags in the Soviet era.

I like poets.  Obviously.  Like the way they see the world.  Like that eternal poetic quest for truth.  That's what I've spent my whole life doing.  I wouldn't know how to approach my life in any other way.  I make sense of my experiences through words.  Words help me bring order to chaos.  I like order.

Saint Marty is thankful tonight for the poets in his life.