Newsletter Issue #49 July, 2015

Rat-rhymers, itinerant poets-for-hire, were the low-end, cultural descendants of powerful tribal bards once feared and revered for their ability to wield language–to praise or scorn, bless or cast curses.  The rat rhymers did not hold such a high station, but their scalding rhymes incanted with spot-on timing could annihilate the rats in one’s barn.  Or, at the very least, they’d motivate the rodents to take shelter elsewhere.  (Surely this was quite useful, so no one back then needed to compose mediations around the question, “Can Poetry Matter?”)

For this news I’m grateful to the literary study Praises and Dispraises by Terrence Des Pres, his chapter on “Yeats and the Rat-Rhymers”.  Des Pres goes on to note that subsequently the less benign powers of this poetic tradition would pass to the satirists whose “rapier wit” was thought to be capable of pricking one’s vital parts.

In our age, the praise poem flourishes while its darker, or at any rate duskier, twin has all but disappeared.  Perhaps the banishing of Bad Poem has its basis in ideology, but there’s also this: it’s damned hard to write a good smack-down poem.  While I don’t long for a return to spell-casting curses, it does seem that in the more sanctioned tier of contemporary poetry (not, surely, in the scrappy open mic realm), a certain bracing spirit of mischief is in short supply.

For its mischief and cunning wit I still love, after these many years, Sukenick’s “The Poster,” included in one of the first feminist era anthologies, Rising Tides:  20^th Century Women Poets, 1973.  Particularly in the superior second sequence–those delectable closing lines– even as the speaker appears to cast herself as victim, at every turn she displays her bardic powers.  This figure, this oppressor, real or imagined, is effectively pinned and bested.

Lynn Sukenick (1938-1995) taught at CSU San Diego, UC Irvine, The New College of California, and other colleges and universities.  Her books of poetry include Houdini (Capra Press, 1973) and Water Astonishing (Ragnarok Press, 1974).  She also published criticism, and in 1997 Zoland Books brought out a collection of her short stories, Danger Wall May Fall.

And, of course, most assuredly not to be overlooked: