The pun lightning of Patricia Lockwood
Or, what's wrong with William Wordsworth
“We get it poets: things are like other things” — Mike Ginn
This tweet never doesn’t make me laugh. Why exactly are we all so fed up with poets? Probably because William Wordsworth, the 19th century Romantic, was infatuated with imbeciles.
This was revealed by the N+7 formula, an exercise developed by ragtag assemblage of French poets and mathematicians known as Oulipo, known more formally as the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle and known more Englishly as the Workshop of Potential Literature. N+7 is a way to rewrite poetry by taking every noun (“N”) and replacing it with the seventh noun that follows it in the dictionary. Sticklers will only accept a word that has the exact meter and rhyme of the one being replaced, while dilettantes can run the automatic version here. If the result is better both as parody and as poem, the original probably had it coming.
The poet Harry Mathews did this with Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud,” which attentive students of literature may remember as the snoozy one about daffodils. It went from:
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
To this:
I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o’er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing in the cheese.
Contrast this imbecilic cheese dancing to the sparkling work of Patricia Lockwood. (Her February London Review of Books lecture on internet culture should be required reading/viewing for all computer owners.) The poet describes her moments of inspiration as pun lightning, that “jolt of connection when the language turns itself inside out, when two words suddenly profess they’re related to each other, or wish to be married, or were in league all along.” That, more often than not, is wit. Here are five of my favourite examples of it from her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy:
The room is finally so wasted it’s barfing all the people inside it into the night.
Usually publishing a poem is like puking in space, or growing an adolescent mustache — no one really notices, and it might be better that way.
It was possible to buy a pro-life pizza, despite the fact that a pizza is by its very definition made out of choices.
Let me speak for the meek and say that we don’t want the earth, if that’s where all the bodies are buried.
We never could control what comes out of our mouths, which means that most of the time we say stupid things and then sometimes something beautiful pops out, whole, intact, and sweet, like a piece of fruit in reverse.
What happens when you run the N+7 on Lockwood? It makes her sound like Wordsworth! Here’s the last line of “The Arch,” her poem about the most famous landmark in St. Louis, Missouri:
Oh no female
armpit lovelier than the armpit of the Arch.
When Oulipofied, it becomes abstract nonsense:
Oh no ferment
arrow lovelier than the arrow of the Archipelago.
Yes to specifics, no to abstractions. Hooray, female armpits; boo, ferment arrows! And much better than Lockwood transmuted into Wordsworth is Lockwood upgrading Hemingway:
I pick up a book of Hemingway quotes about writing — displayed between a book of Hemingway quotes about fishing and a book of Hemingway quotes about big-game hunting; apparently the man never uttered anything but quotes — and read: Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously. I laugh out loud. Bitched from the start. Good old Hemingway. The old motherbitching tit-sucker of a she-bastard, or whatever the hell he would say.
Quick quips; lightning
“Poetry is the only art people haven’t yet learned to consume like soup.” — W.H. Auden
I love this line because it hearkens back to a time when people couldn’t get enough soup.
“All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.” — Oscar Wilde
And therein lies the problem.
“My favorite poem is the one that starts ‘Thirty days hath September’ because it actually tells you something.” — Groucho Marx
Here, Julius Henry “Groucho” Marx (1890-1977) pops the kernel of truth.
Thanks for savouring the seventh issue of Get Wit Quick, the weekly clearinghouse of fictional profanity. It sprung out of my book Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting and is the perfect gift for the she-bastard who has everything.