So it’s once again the cruelest month, but we poets should be celebrating. After all, we have a whole nationally recognized month to tout our cause for beauty and justice and word play and well-formed lines and images that hum themselves off the page and into the ears of our readers.
But the gorilla on my office desk is not happy. Not happy at all. In fact, he’s frowning. Does he want a banana split? Veggie cheeseburger? Glazed donut from the coffee shop across the road from campus? I always think he’s hungry (which he is). This time, though, he has confided he is perplexed why he was not chosen to be the poster child for the Academy of American Poets poster commemorating National Poetry Month. (See the poster here: National Poetry Month Poster 2011 )
Yes, my gorilla admitted that he’s none too pleased to be dissed by the Academy. Why, he wants to know, did such a line—“Bright Objects Hypnotize the Mind”—upstage his cute countenance. He sees the merits in Elizabeth Bishop; he likes her attention to detail, her fascination with animals, her surprise endings. And he admits that he has been hypnotized by the glitter of hummingbirds’ wings, the rainbows of the waterfall, and, when he is taking up residence on my desk, my own smile. (He likes to make me smile and flatter me and distract me from my writing and essay grading, bad gorilla).
Why, my gorilla laments, did Emily Dickinson’s iconic white dress get a whole poster to itself with a quote from her letters: “Nature is a haunted house—but Art—is a house that tries to be haunted”—yet Bishop’s line floats eerily on a scaffolding erected in a swamp without one ape, monkey, or cockatoo in sight. How is that poetic? How is that symbolic? The poster this year is just words taking up space in a swamp, Gorilla complains, his jaw jutting, pouting, a little spittle collecting in the corners of his mouth.
I agree. Poor Gorilla. But I don’t have the heart to tell him: back at home I have that Dickinson poster framed. He’d probably go gorilla-ballistic if he knew. And as Bishop advised: I’d have to try playing with my ring to calm him down (bright objects hypnotize the mind)—or flash him my smile. That gets him every time.
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