No One Wants An Empty Sausage

When I was in elementary/middle/high school, I enjoyed writing poetry. At least, I thought I did. I used poetry as an avenue for comedy; I could tell jokes and create humorous metaphors while also rhyming. What fun! I wrote my parents poems for their birthdays, and when I was assigned poetry writing in high school, I did my best to make my poems as ridiculous as possible.

Unfortunately, no one corrected me (at least, not in a way I could grasp), and I never saw the issue with it. This goofy understanding of poetry stayed with me through college to my last semester, which was when I decided to take the "Poetry Writing" class for an easy three credits.

My first assigned poem was a "love poem." Since comedy was my expertise, I sat down and wrote a really long poem about a knight who rides to rescue Rapunzel from her tower, only to find that she jumped out of her window and died before he got there.

It was a poignant concept to be sure, but I didn't yet understand how to write meaningful poetry (nor did I care to understand; all the "meaningful poetry" I'd ever read was high-concept, literary hogwash that I barely comprehended and thus, didn't give a crap about).

So, my poem was a cacophonous disaster, chock-full of interior rhymes and alliteration, TONS of jokes (including an entire stanza describing the knight "taking a leak"), and an ultimately heavy-handed handling of the underlying theme (vaguely centering on society's expectations for women).

When I read it to the class, people laughed. I felt it was a success, since laughter had been my goal. But then, in a private meeting with my professor, she ripped it apart. She said it wasn't meaningful, it was too chaotic, and it was NOT a good example of what poetry is supposed to be.

So, over the course of the semester, I had to deconstruct and rebuild my entire understanding of "poetry" as a concept. This process bled into my fiction writing, as well, and has ultimately proven more helpful than any of the literature classes I took (more on this topic some other time).

In that class, I learned that it's never okay to sacrifice depth for comedy. Though the audience may laugh, they will always see through meaningless jabber. Humor is a decorative membrane stretched over the true meat of a story, like the skin of a sausage. I'm pretty sure any of us would prefer to have a meat-filled sausage, rather than an flimsy tube of edible plastic.

This poetry class was one of the first places where I began to understand what "meaning" means.

At the end of the semester, I had to resubmit all of my poems, revised, in a portfolio. Most of the other poems were easy to revise, because I had started to get the hang of how to actually write poetry (like focusing on small snapshots of time, using fewer adverbs, and spending more time on the "meat" than on any sort of flamboyant rhyme scheme).

However, when I arrived at my first poem, I was bamboozled. I tried a few times to simply edit the many stanzas, to try to mold it into something that resembles "good poetry," but that was futile. I had to restart from scratch. So, I searched out the main concept of the poem and condensed it into a mere 10 lines. For the sake of your sanity, I won't share the original poem, but here's the rewritten version that I submitted in my portfolio:

Dry

Rapunzel’s body lay broken at

the base of the tower,

dashed against the mossy rocks,

and the prince

in his wisdom

muttered that she should have

shaven her legs,

before galloping away

to find another

perfection.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed it. I'm considering sharing more of my poetry in the future, so keep your eyes peeled. Maybe someday, I'll show you all that floppy piece of sausage skin that was this poem's first draft, so you can cringe along with me.

Have a good week, and I'll see you next time!

- Tyler