I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.
(from The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot)
I thought today we could take a summer stroll through the mousy maze of poetry — O do not ask, "What is it?" Let us go and bite the biscuit. Eating almost anything's easier than nibbling on what poetry actually is, and the difficulty of defining poetry says a lot about the problems we have with it: it's a lot of trouble right from the get-go. The great phrase-and-dictionary-monger Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) had this to say when asked, "Sir, what is poetry?"
"Why sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. We all know what light is; but it is not easy to tell what it is."
But a few famous definitions are: the emotional history of the world; the rhythmical creation of beauty; the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; and finally, from the impish Robert Frost, the stuff poets write.
The poet Robert Wallace (1932-1999) claimed that Americans simply can't concentrate on any complicated piece of writing more than 12 lines long, so he founded a magazine, Bits, at Case Western Reserve University to publish small accessible poems. With his encouragement, I undertook to write 24 little poems about a little creature, our friend the rat. (With fruit trees and a woodpile in our yard, Jeanne and I have had up-close-and-personal confrontations with citrus rats.)
We also wanted to show that poems don't have to be saccharine dirges about love and flowers (now appropriated by Hallmark Cards), but can be about gas stations (Elizabeth Bishop), dirt (Seamus Heaney), egg rolls (Denise Duhamel) — anything at all.
Writing smaller and smaller, I produced the poem with my longest title (At 4 a.m. a Rat Crawls Over My Chest), which reads in its entirety: I pick up the ice-pick. What makes it a poem? Well, there's a lot of blank space on the page, it's emotional (spooky-scary), a little surprising (in a gross way), and — after a moment — funny. At least people tend to laugh, uneasily, when I read it out loud. Its single line also repeats "pick" — a "perfect" rhyme— — and is composed of two metrically matched phrases — i PICK up / the ICE-pick — called amphibrachs (every profession has its secret language). I even changed it from its original 2 a.m. spot because "4" goes better with "Crawl." Finally, if poetry's the kind of writing that people tend to read more than once, this one makes it easy to do! But poems, in a way, are like jokes: if they don't make you react the first time, no amount of explanations will help.
The end result was a chapbook called The Rat Poems (1978), 24 short poems, one for each hour of the day, illustrated by Jeanne. Even she had to react to criticism during this project, which lasted several months, with many revisions. One day she had some sketches out on her desk when our oldest son Pete — the house expert on Rodentia — came by. "What do you think?" she asked him.
"Nice gerbils, Mom," he said. Back to the drawing board!
The Rat Poems had a particularly American poetic history. Not much money changed hands: Wallace paid me in copies, and sent hundreds out free to poets and writers around the country. The postage was on the university, the paper was contributed by paper mills around Cleveland, and the book was printed by Wallace in his garage. It had no reviews that I know of, but I'd get occasional letters from around the country from readers who enjoyed it.
So it lived an underground existence — more mole-like than rat-like — and after a while I pretty much forgot about it. Then one day, many years later, I wandered, suitably, into the basement of the Robert Frost Library at Emory University in Atlanta. I was going to be writer-in-residence and needed a library card. The crusty old librarian hunched over my name, looked up and whispered, sotto voce, "Meinke… Oh, yes — the rat man!"
We shook hands, I took my card, and went up to my desk to write.
RAT POEMS
At 1 a.m. the Moon Pops Out
God's tennis ball
This time
I'm ready for it
but the rats are ready too
They go back back
I'm amazed:
They use a two-handed backhand!
At 11 a.m. I Collect Rat Quotes
My kingdom for a rat
My love is like a red red rat
A rat in time saves nine
There are rats in the belfry rats in the mold
Rats in my sweetie's pants nine days old
At 9 p.m. the Rats Are Making Love
in the missionary position
That is on
the Missionary
At Midnight I Say My Prayers
Give us this day
Our daily
Rat
—Peter Meinke (www.petermeinke.com) admits to a fondness for cheese; Jeanne prefers seeds of various sorts. The above Rat Poems can be found in The Contracted World (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2006).
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2009.
