This post is the work of the poet Heather Christle. This, and more from her, in the near future–™
Recently some mail arrived from Cameroon. It was not, as I first imagined, a letter from my sister (a Peace Corps volunteer), but a packet of documents she’d collected from a nearby high school. Apparently, an English teacher there became upset when he discovered that his first-period class had provided quiz answers to his second-period class, and so he demanded of everyone a 500-word essay on the importance of learning English. Here’s a sample essay, from my Cameroonian envelope:
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class.
I will not disturb in English class…
and so on, until the student reached 500 words. (504, technically. Otherwise he would have to end on “disturb,” exactly what he was promising not to do!)
Immediately I began to think of a reading I’d been to recently, part of the annual Juniper Literary Festival. Tao Lin read a poem that begins:
when i was five
i went fishing with my family
my dad caught a turtle
my mom caught a snapper
my brother caught a crab
i caught a whale
that night we ate crab
the next night we ate turtle
the next night we ate snapper
the next night we ate whale
the next night we ate whale
the next night we ate whale
the next night we ate whale…
and so on, until he reaches, I don’t know, a point where he no longer wants to hit CTRL-V? You can read the poem, in its entirety, at the University of British Columbia’s Terry, should you so desire.
James Tate has a fantastic poem of this species, “Lewis & Clark Overheard in Conversation,” which consists entirely of the sentence “Then we’ll get us some wine and spare ribs,” repeated 23 times. (I am beginning to wonder if there’s some sort of link between eating and obsessive repetition. Please send evidence if you have it.)
These poems beg the question of the page vs. the performance–how to read such work aloud? Lin solved this problem rather well, I thought, by reading “the next night we ate whale,” several times and then showing the page to the audience and saying, “It keeps going.”
What I want to know is just how pissed John Barr and Dana Gioia would be if the Poetry Foundation/NEA’s recitation contests began to see students competing with texts like these. I say someone should try it.