Jefferson Carter is a retired doctor of literature. Eight years ago he taught at a college where I was a janitor. One day on campus I introduced myself to him, and he blew me off like I was a door-to-door Mormon. I wrote a story about it recently which was published in a small magazine. Well, he got wind of it. He then claimed publicly that he had caught me masturbating in his office with a pair of tweezers.
One day Dr. Carter wrote me:
"OK, Tweezers-dick, maybe there's a way to prove to you you're not as good a poet as you dream you are. Let's find an online editor, someone neither of us knows, and ask him/her to judge which of our poems is better.”
I let him choose the judge. Oddly, “someone neither of us knows” turned out to be a young MFA friend of his. Guess who lost the contest? My punishment was that I had to buy Carter’s book. It’s called My Kind Of Animal and it was published by Tucson Pima Arts Council with public funds.
I guess by perfect-binding a 36 page book you can justify charging 12 bucks for it. On the slick back cover Karen Brennan blurbs: “Timely, urgent, restless and darkly hilarious... Bravo!”
The first poem, Please, begins:
I wake up,
eye-to-eye with the cat’s anus.
He’s purring on my chest.
Why me, oh, Lord?
Please. These lines set up the book perfectly: limp imagery, cutesy humor and the smug lamentations of a person with nothing to worry about. Later in this same poem he says:
I hear good things
about the ungulates,
their table manners, their
clean plates, my kind
of animal…
Carter is known locally for his “mastery of conversational language”, but here’s this word “ungulate”, which he uses again later in the book, presumably to “tie it all together”. I had to look it up: it means “hooved animal”. Like a cow. Carter’s kind of animal is a cow.
William Pitt Root (Tucson’s first poet laureate, i.e. the guy with the red hat) called Carter a “Mensch of the Unmentionable”. One example of Carter boldly ignoring taboo is in a poem where he gets drunk at a poetry reading. Gasp! Another poem is about an old woman farting. Oh how the blue-hairs blush! He tackles many other unmentionable subjects such as personal ads, yoga, Blake, Whitman, L. Ron Hubbard, Tom Cruise, fanny packs, anogenital distance, white cake, the overuse of the word “like” among college students, vampires, more yoga, vests, and pteromerhanophobia.
All of this could be forgiven if in 40 years of teaching writing Carter had actually discovered how to write. Here are the ending lines of a poem called Lecturing my Body:
The animal’s a ditch,
the zookeeper a wheelbarrow.
A wheelbarrow bringing
tobacco, whisky
& even love because,
well, just because.
Speaking of wheelbarrows, this is from the brilliantly titled poem The Nature of Beauty:
All I see is
sleepy Dr. Williams, the morning
the little girls’ fever broke, looking
out the farmhouse window at, yes,
I just have to say it, the beauty
of that wet, red wheelbarrow.
The lesson here: it’s ok to be derivative and dull if you admit you are aware of the fact.
In another poem he says:
We’re yawing, my fellow travelers & me
(fuck good grammar, I like those
“m” sounds)
Notice the “unerring irreverence” displayed in the word “fuck” and the symbol “&”, not to mention the unabashed nose-thumbing at the establishment.
If you’re looking for compassion, forget it. In Carter’s mind the human species does not deserve compassion. And if you think good literature should involve conflict, you’re out of luck again. In many of the poems the only real problem dealt with is Carter’s kind of elitist depression. There are two poems in the book where the main issue is a headache. Carter has a headache while doing laundry; Carter has a headache while redecorating the living room. I have a headache too, after reading this book, but I don’t have a PHD and so my headache doesn’t hurt as much as his, and really never could.
Mather Schneider is the author of Drought Resistant Strain (Interior Noise Press, 2009).
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