Snailing on the Railing

About 5 years ago now, I took a picture of snail climbing one of the handrails at my then-office.  One does not expect to find such a thing on the way in to work, so I remarked on it, took the picture, and thought to myself: “snailing on the railing ... heheh.”

A few weeks later I took this lame piece of doggerel and turned it into a whole lame poem.  Now, understand: I believe that I’m a pretty good writer.  But that doesn’t make me a good poet ... in point of fact, I’m a mediocre poet, and even then my college poetry professor might call that bragging.  But every once in a great while I’m struck by ... something ... and I write a smaller piece, nearly always something with a definite rhyme scheme but playing fast and loose with the meter.  None of them have ever been any good, really, although I’m quite fond of the very first one of these I wrote, although my poetry professor called it “trite,” or “overblown,” or possibly both of those, or something else equally soul-crushing—my poetry professor was a bit of a dick, really, and made more than one person in the class cry, but he taught me quite a lot about what poetry really ought to be, and what it has to say, and what it needs to convey to people other than its author (i.e. to its audience).  He would often say something along the lines of “if you’re pouring out your emotions on the page, and it makes you feel better, that’s lovely, but that’s a diary, not a poem.”  He told us right at the beginning not to bring that stuff in, but people often don’t listen, so, you know: tears.  But he pushed us, and some of us actually were good poets, and I learned a hell of a lot in that class, and one of the main things I learned is that I am not a particularly good poet.

But I’m okay with that.  I don’t write poetry very often anyway.  I don’t read poetry very often either (probably those two things are connected).  The poems I like are typically not free verse: they have boundaries, even if they push them.  I like “The Walrus and the Carpenter” by Lewis Carroll, and I like “The Raven” by Edgar Allen Poe.  Perhaps most relevantly to the effort below, I like “anyone lived in a pretty how town” by E. E. Cummings.  But perhaps before we start deconstructing my piece, we should take a look at what it looks like when it’s all constructed.  Below is the picture, and the poem.

there’s a snailing
on the railing
and I cannot help but think
it’s a failing
of the trailing
having once been on the brink

what one decides
as he resides
here—it makes me wonder more
what he’s tailing
unassailing
what he even came here for

was he unhappy?
home life crappy?
thought he’d see the great wide world?
was he ailing?
and now prevailing
with his destiny unfurled?

does he regret it
find it fetid
the universe beyond his sill
p’raps he’s wailing
even flailing
wishes to be back there still

then again heightened
completely unfrightened
maybe all along his goal
this peak he’s scaling
grit unfailing
to match the soaring of his soul

I wish to draw it full
even if implausible
to slake my yearning fancy
to add more detailing
than only mere surveilling
or traipsing off feeling antsy

because otherwise
(if I may summarize)
this image is just too plain
and it’s merely a snailing
here on the railing
and that would seem a shame

This is not much changed from what I originally wrote, those 5 years ago.  I fixed a few clumsy word choices and cleaned up the meter slightly ... which is not to say that many of the word choices are not still clumsy, or that the meter is now untortured.  But it’s better than my initial off-the-cuff effort (just take my word for it).

Looking back on it somewhat critically, it seems to have some things in common with Cummings.  The lack of capitalization is the most obvious—Cummings somewhat famously played fast-and-loose with case (and punctuation), to the point where there’s still a good deal of controversy over whether his name should be rendered as “e e cummings” or not (Wikipedia says not).  There are of course varying opinions on why he did this, but I personally have always felt he wanted to challenge our preconceived notions of grammar; to make us think about why we use this or that convention, and what they really add (or don’t add) to our conversation.  I wish I could claim to be as thought-provoking, but the truth is that I find poetry really difficult to punctuate.  I nearly always know exactly what to do in prose, but the very compactness of poetry is part of why I suck at it so much.  When given a lot of words to play with, I find it easy to write, and easy to revise: the freedom to replace 5 words with 2—or with 10—gives me a lot of options, and I can play with those options and figure out the best choice.  But the nature of poetry (especially poetry with meter and/or rhyme) means that many options are automatically lost, because they just won’t fit, and you need to agonize over every word.  In fact, my poetry professor used to say exactly that: in prose, some words can ride along for free.  In poetry, every word, no matter how seemingly insignificant, has to pull its weight.  And the same goes for punctuation, but it becomes worse: not only does every punctuation mark have to have a definitive purpose, but it messes with the flow.  In prose, punctuation directs the flow.  As a prose writer, I use punctuation to tell the reader when to breathe, when to anticipate, when to pause in thought.  But poetry has line breaks, and that is its own flow.  Punctuation, it seems to me, is often fighting with the line breaks to direct the flow, and it usually loses.  Sometimes, like the work above, I just throw up my hands and toss the majority of it out altogether.  So, while I wish I were being provocative like Cummings, the truth is more like I’m just being lazy.

Well, mostly.  I’m sort of telling you to let yourself be guided by the line breaks: the lack of punctuation and capitalization is just a way to say, hang on to the flow of the individual lines, because there’s nothing else to hang on to.

The message of the piece is pretty obvious, because my poetry is not good enough to be subtle.  It’s just a brief musing on the human desire to assign meaning to things, even when they probably don’t mean much of anything.  But, more than anything, I’m just having some fun with language.  This is way more inventive with rhyme than I’m prone to; rhyming (or perhaps I should say attempting to rhyme) “implausible” with “draw it full” is way more ballsy than I normally am with poetry.  But, hey: you gotta take chances in life in order to find out what works and what doesn’t.  In this case, it probably doesn’t, but I’m glad I made the attempt in any case.

So I’m being a bit self-deprecative, obviously, but I guess I must be a little bit proud of it, or I wouldn’t have resurrected it after 5 years, and subjected it to public scrutiny here on the blog.  Or maybe I just ran out of time and didn’t have anything else to give you this week.  Either way, I hope you’ve enjoyed it.