4 Comic Prose Poems from Sherman Alexie
Proof (Yet Again) There's Nothing More Serious Than Humor
Readers new to Sherman Alexie’s poetry, especially the poems he’s currently writing on Substack, would think he’s been a minimalist his whole career. Having taught two of his earlier books, First Indian on the Moon and One Stick Song, for a course called “Black Humor in Contemporary American Poetry,” I was bit surprised by these new poems with their short line breaks and condensed stanzas, which, visually, remind me of poems by Emily Dickinson or Robert Creeley. I was even more surprised by how effortlessly, both stylistically and thematically, Alexie seemed to make this transition. These poems also seemed to signal a change in tone, being more contemplative and spiritual than earlier Alexie poems.
I was first drawn Alexie’s poetry and fiction because I sensed a kindred sensibility. Like me, he was a guy who grew up in a hardscrabble world, though his rez neighborhood made my working-class one look like Scarsdale, NY. Also, like me, he had escaped that world through, of all things, poetry and fiction. But perhaps “escaped” is the wrong word, because Alexie always manages to celebrate his upbringing, even as his immediate family and tribe have continued to navigate grand narratives that exclude them. This clash between the pompous promises of (mostly white) grand narratives (whether political, literary, religious, or you-name-it) and the reality of life on the ground, is what accounts for much of the black humor in Alexie’s work—specifically all the satire and parody we see in his prose poetry, which makes sense, because the prose poem has always welcomed irreverence. The choice to write a poem in prose necessarily involves, in a way, shooting “Real Poetry” the finger, because “Real Poetry” often hasn’t treated the prose poet too well in the past. In fact, in the early 1970s and the whole of the ’80s and ’90s, prose poets were often encouraged to show up at literary events wearing paper bags over their heads, with a only a small hole through which they could breathe.
An exaggeration? Of course, but then, as we shall see, exaggeration, parody, substitution, and juxtaposition are all techniques Alexie’s satiric prose poetry relies on. Although many comic poets poets learn these techniques by studying the masters, my suspicion has always been that many of us are just natural-born wise guys/girls, and it’s almost as if these techniques are hardwired in us. It’s just the way we make sense of an all-too-often-absurd world.
Consider “Reservation Drive-in” from First Indian on the Moon where Alexie uses the iconic grand narrative of the Drive-in to show how American culture both “others” young Native American teenagers, even as those teenagers internalize it and make it their own. In this poem, Alexie mentions The French Connection, Rocky, Enter the Dragon, Stars Wars, and the Bicycle Thief—the latter which comically begins: “Charlie Chaplin was a Spokane Indian.” Juxtaposition and substitution are the main techniques here: the juxtaposition of the fantasy lives of the heroes of these movies with the hijinks of the boys at the drive-in. But Alexie is “seriously” comic, as we discover toward the end of the Star Wars section when he writes: “Over and over, we make these movies our own promises, imagine our fathers never lose, pretend our mothers slice their skins in testament. Soon we will sit around old drums and sing songs: ‘You promised us the earth and all we got was the moon.’”
Lines like the last one prove that, indeed, there is nothing more serious than comedy. Anyone can get on a soapbox and rage about the ironic complexities of life, but just try to do it in a poem using comedy. If you want to tell your dad (the establishment) to fuck off, you better be able to make him laugh, or at least smile, while you’re doing it, or you’re going to get your head knocked off. Humor is one way to purchase that get-out-of-jail-free card. “Humor makes contact with the reader easier,” the poet Nicanor Parra once wrote. “Remember, it's when you lose your sense of humor that you begin to reach for your pistol.”
Much of what I say above about how Alexie examines the ironies of growing up Native American in “Reservation Drive-in” could be said about many of the prose poems or hybrid prose poems in First Indian on the Moon, especially ones that rely on parody. Concerning this subgenre of burlesque, M.H. Abrams writes, “parody imitates the serious manner and characteristic features of a particular literary work, or the distinctive style of a particular author, or the typical stylistic and other features of a serious literary genre, and deflates the original by applying the imitation to a lowly or comically inappropriate subject.” In First Indian, the titles of many of the prose poems suggest what grand narratives are being parodied: “Rediscovering America,” “Family Cookbook,” “A Twelve-Step Treatment Program,” “A Reservation Table of Elements,” and my favorite, “Seven Love Songs Which Include the Collected History of the United States of America.”
To show Alexie’s mastery of the comic-and-therefore-serious possibilities of the prose poem, I offer the below prose poems that I solicited for an international anthology I edited with the Australian poet/critic Cassandra Atherton Dreaming Awake. As you read them, consider what Charles Simic wrote concerning Keats idea of “negative capability.”: “The poet is in the midst. The poem, too, is in the midst, a kind of magnet for complex, historical, literary, and psychological complexes, as well as a way of maintaining oneself in the face of that multiplicity.” Here, Simic sees the poet as a kind of lightning rod, attracting all of these forces to him. There is a risk, of course, when one embraces this kind of “uncertainty” from a comic perspective. but, as the below prose poems prove, that risk is always worth it. These prose poem are surprising, funny, touching, and provocative, all at the same time.
Grocery List
—those instant coffee pouches made by
the corporation that us leftists pretend
to hate
—that cereal that rakes the roof of your mouth
but makes you nostalgic for childhood
—that can of mixed nuts that doesn’t contain
peanuts because if you buy one
that contains peanuts then it will
contain about 70% peanuts because
peanuts are cheaper, yes, but don’t taste
anywhere as good as cashews,
walnuts, almonds, and those little
green ones
—lactose-free milk because the ability to digest
lactose is mostly a Northern European
trait and you’re not Northern European
—100% wheat bread, though you distrust
anything that claims to be 100%
of anything because it reeks
of religious, political, and cultural
fundamentalism
—grape jelly, even though you read somewhere
that the FDA allows a jar of jelly to have
like 27 insect parts, and that’s disgusting,
but all of us will be eating crickets, ants,
and mealworms after the apocalypse,
so maybe you should think of eating
slightly infested jelly as practice
for an unpredictable future
—natural peanut butter, and yes, this contradicts
your opinion of peanuts, but peanut is
to peanut butter as tomato is to ketchup
—AAA batteries, but wait, no, maybe you need
AA batteries, shit, okay, buy both types
—a dozen eggs, but don’t check to see if
any of them are broken because you
like to gamble and it’s like playing
the lottery or, God, don’t say this
aloud, it’s like playing twelve
simultaneous games of chicken
—a box of those cheap cigars, which you
never smoke but purchase maybe twice
a year because they remind you
of your late father
—a bag of toilet paper rolls even though
they are less expensive at Target
but you have no plans to go
to Target anytime soon so you
might as well buy them here
—a pack of Big League Chewing Gum
because it reminds you
of that walk-off home run
that Joe Carter hit to win
the World Series in 1993
—a bouquet of tulips to put on your
mother’s grave, though she’s not
dead, so you lean the flowers
against your mother’s front door
at two a.m. so they fall into the house
in the morning when she goes out
to grab the morning paper, and
you’ve done this maybe a dozen
times since your father died,
and it makes your mother laugh
and mourn with gratitude and feel beloved
—if you made a list of all the grocery items
that you’d wanted to buy but forgot
to put on the list then you’d have written
an autobiography about unrequited love
God is a Sonnet
1. Prayer. 2. More prayer. 3. Yet more prayer. 4. I don’t believe in God but I believe in prayer. 5. I know that’s a contradiction. 6. Question: So who’s waiting to hear my prayers? 7. Answer: A church pew filled with every human who’s ever lived 8. God was invented…9…. by a caveman who’d been exiled by his tribe. 10. Wouldn’t you invent prayer if you were sitting on the plain guarded by one small campfire while your predators circled in the dark? 11. Prayer grew in size with each successive human—with every frightened human. 12. Are you frightened? I’m frightened. 13. Each prayer is made of billions of words—every word that has ever been said in every language. 14. I know how to say listen to me in my tribal tongue . Do you know how to say it in yours?
A Short History of Indigenous Comedy I laugh when people attempt to control the definition of funny. Who are you to say what I should find hilarious? At my mother’s wake, only twenty feet from her coffin, my cousins and I played Cards Against Humanity. And, God, did we roar at all the wildly inappropriate humor. I played a “Trail of Tears” card and a cousin played a “genocide” card, In her coffin, my mother wore a beaded medallion in the family colors. (Grief) I won’t tell you what they are. (Grief) A public-figure Indian like me needs to keep some secrets. (Grief) But I can tell you that my mother’s medallion was so beautiful that God, upon my mother’s arrival in Heaven, was so jealous that God wished he’d spent an eighth day creating more Indians. (Grief) My memory of my mother’s funeral is clouded with past and present sadness. My complicated and contradictory mother was dead. And what would she have said about us playing that playfully evil card game at her wake? She would’ve been honored that we honored her by laughing at death and destruction. Hahahahahaha Hahahahahaha Hahahahahaha Hahahahahaha I laugh in the four directions North toward the mythical land bridge that brought the ancient Asians who became us and South toward the caves where ancient tools challenge the white man’s stories about who we are and East toward the first days of our genocide and West toward where I live now I left my reservation forty-two years ago. I left my mother and my tribe. Recently, a white fourth-grader asked me what I miss about the reservation and I said, “I miss the slash marks twenty feet up the pine trees that we said were the work of giant black bears.”
Game Theory
1. He stacks his sins on his upturned elbow like quarters.
2. By “he” I mean “I.”
3. Do you remember that game? You flipped your arm, catapulted that stack of quarters into the air, and tried to catch all of them in one hand.
4. The difficulty and number of quarters increased with each confessed sin.
5. This is not a Catholic poem.
6. This is a Catholic poem.
7. I was baptized when my mother threw a half-full can of Diet Pepsi at my head. I was so stunned by her act of violence that I forget to duck. The can exploded when it hit my forehead and soaked me with soda. Also, there were peanuts because my mother liked to drink her Diet Pepsi with peanuts.
8. Sweet and salt.
9. I’ve just decided that my mother’s Indian name was Sweet & Salt.
10. I loved her.
11. She was bipolar, undiagnosed.
12. I’m bipolar, diagnosed.
13. During the depressions, the mosquitoes shove the moon into the night’s sharp teeth.
14. During the mania, the morning birds rip the sun in half.
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
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
Exactly, Tom.
‘The choice to write a poem in prose necessarily involves, in a way, shooting “Real Poetry” the finger, because “Real Poetry” often hasn’t treated the prose poet too well in the past. In fact, in the early 1970s and the whole of the ’80s and ’90s, prose poets were often encouraged to show up at literary events wearing paper bags over their heads, with a only a small hole through which they could breathe.’
I was once married to lady with an MFA in poetry who just looked at me with pity.