A Glass Half-Empty or Half-Full Poem
and Can (or Should) One Analyze One's Own Poems
I guess you can call me a glass half-empty person. That used to bother me because of the negative connotations of that phrase, but I have come to embrace my outlook on life, and have even come to see it as a valid approach to life’s unpredictability.
In my case, I enjoy life more when I expect the worst, as long as I don’t obsess or get depressed about it. For one thing, it makes me prepared to deal with anything. For another, it makes me very happy when the worst doesn’t occur, which is usually the case.
To me that’s better than being one of those people who ignore reality and naively croon inspirational clichés about almost any tragedy. There’s a difference between being optimistic and clueless. Also, those people are worthless to you when you need sympathy for even the smallest mishaps. For example, in graduate school, I broke my ankle in a pickup basketball game, continuing to play on it until the game was over. Consequently, I developed a bad case of tendinitis after the cast was put on. I remember telling my ex-mother-in-law that the pain was so excruciating I wanted to put a bullet into my head, to which she replied, “Think about how lucky you are. You could be paralyzed from the waist down.” “Well, yeah,” I wanted to respond, “but it still fucking hurts.”
And if you still are skeptical of my approach to the vagaries of life, consider this from Marcus Aurelius, who certainly wasn’t an Eeyore.
Everyone approaches courageously a danger which they have prepared themselves to meet long before, and withstands even hardships if they have previously practiced how to meet them. But, contrariwise, the unprepared are panic-stricken even at the most trifling things. We must see to it that nothing shall come upon us unforeseen
Note that Marcus Aurelius is stressing the idea of preparation that I mentioned above. Like me, he feels emboldened, not defeated, by misfortune.
The title of my first book of prose poem, Pretty Happy!
Pretty Happy!
I have no siblings who have killed themselves, a few breakdowns here and there, my son sometimes talking back to me, but, in general, I’m pretty happy. And if the basement leaks, and fuses fart out when the coffee machine comes on, and if the pastor beats us up with the same old parables, and raccoons overturn the garbage cans and ham it up at 2 o’clock in the morning while some punk is cutting the wires on my car stereo, I can still say, I’m pretty happy.
Pretty happy! Pretty happy! I whisper to my wife at midnight, waking to another noise, reaching for the baseball bat I keep hidden under our bed.
from my While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems (Undertaker [book form, hardcover and paperback and KindleUndertaker, [for $5]
I’d like to talk about this poem as a critic and not its author, after which I’ll ask if it’s even possible for an author to look objectively at his work.
Looking back at “Pretty Happy!, it’s easy for me to see why I chose it as the title poem of my first book. The title basically summarizes my half-empty view of the world, a philosophy of life that I probably could trace through my complete opus. What’s implicit in the title is that one cannot, and, I’d argue, should not, think one can be completely happy. In fact, the best we can hope for is being “pretty” happy, which makes the exclamation point at the end of the title ironic.
Rather than being a hopeless way of looking at life, I think it’s a realistic one, and one that makes me break into a smile approximating Sisyphus’s begrudging smirk as he pushes his rock up the hill. I like a life that gives me happiness, yet always makes clear not to get too comfortable. You never know what’s coming.
Look closely at the poem, and note how the speaker keeps insisting (really, protesting way too much) that whatever happens, he will still, by God, be “pretty happy!.” The phrase is repeated so often, it almost becomes an incantation to ward off all bad things.
And then just when the speaker becomes somewhat comfortable, both a real and metaphorical noise rattles the night, which means he must reach for his real and metaphorical bat to combat it.
Now all of the above suggests that I had a plan when I wrote “Pretty Happy!”, which would be completely untrue. Even today, the writing process is a mystery to me. The best I can say is one reads a lot of literature, developing a certain literary competency. Then one becomes obsessed with a genre, a genre that provides a landscape for one’s predispositions and preoccupations. Finally, one writes and writes and revises endlessly to create a work, not really having the objectivity at the moment of creation to say something intelligent about the final product.
And yet, after years of toiling in my lonesome little room, writing prose poem after prose poem and reading critical study after critical study and thousands of prose poems when I edited my journal, I can now see thematic and stylistic patterns in my work—themes and strategies that have become as natural to me as breathing. Having this knowledge won’t help me write a decent poem in the future, but, hell, as a way of understanding oneself better, you can’t beat it.
And on that note, let’s end with this little gem, again from While the Undertaker Sleeps. (Undertaker [book form, hardcover and paperback and KindleUndertaker, [for $5])
The Half-Full, Half-Empty Episode
A car that’s a bass guitar rattles my windows—a ritual I run my life by unless someone knocks on the door. No one ever knocks on the door. Hello from the City where the natives drive little cars with big antennae, where pedestrians lug enormous “I”s on their backs. “As a man thinketh, so he is.” But I ain’t been thinketh so good lately, indecisive as a blind switchboard operator with two left hands. Hello from the City where it’s morning, where the rain-washed speeding traffic can make a snake nervous. “Hallelujah!” I yell, tripping over annotated self-help manuals strewn across the floor—then dead-headed by the sight of two long-stemmed roses peeking over a windowsill, by a saxophone singing in the distance, by the hickory smell of bacon. “The correct answer,” my wife explains, “is that the glass contains water.” Hello from the City where certainty can be found in a rose, in the burnt portion of a cheese omelet, in the matching yellow headbands of two long-stemmed roses, in a lousy glass of water.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems KindleUndertaker, [for $5])
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss
Oh, I do love these (especially the title poem, which I hadn't seen for quite a spell, not least because I identify so strongly with its/your attitude. I had to smile at one word: when our old GP retired, we were doing a new patient interview with her successor, an equally fabulous woman. She looked at our living will directives, glanced at my wife (who's almost uninterruptedly upbeat although, believe me, a long way from "clueless") and whispered "Tigger." Then she turned my way and whispered "Eeyore."
"pretty" is the adjectival equivalence of "curb your enthusiasm."
"half full vs half empty" is not just shorthand for distinguishing between
optimistic and pessimistic views, it also is a determinate of
temporal perceptiveness:
"half empty" laments the past and the loss of yesterday.
"half full" celebrates the present and what remains today.