ABOUT

CONTENTS

EDITORIAL

ARCHIVE

LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

My immediate task here is filling the page that has been thrust upon me. Our East Bank Editor, Tom Hartman, is hard at work putting the finishing touches on his essay on the vagaries of shopping at IKEA, one that he may or may not hand in in a timely manner, and one that I can only assume will not be in haiku form.

It would be wonderful to know that there's random hakuists out there, trolling the web looking for places to display their work. But there aren't. Think of all of the free-versists hitting those links, reading submission guidelines. Now think of writers of Eastern forms, perhaps by nature a more reticent lot, doing the same thing. Doesn't happen. Maybe that explains why this current issue of La Petite Zine lacks any contents in this section. For now, however, I have this apologia, plus a story with real live famous people, which I offer now to you.

***
It can be said that there isn't enough condescension in poetry. It can be said, well, because I just said it. But please, don't take me for being condescending. Don't let us get off on the wrong track.

All I'm saying is that there's one thing that isn't pointed out enough in this super-serious PoetryWorld. It is this: We got here first. Prose is the johnny-come-lately. Poetry came out singing. Prose debuted on the bottoms of invoices, orders for wheat, dispositions of armies; prose, in short, was functional marginalia.

What's left for poets? Dubiousness? Randall Jarrell, in his 1951 essay "The Obscurity of the Poet," writes that "today, many of the readers a poet would value most have hardly learned to read any poetry; and many of those who regularly read his poems have values so different from his that he is troubled by their praise, and vexed but reassured by their blame." How true today, for any poet of any form. And although I am by no means a master or expert of tanka or haiku, I consider myself nonetheless a "reader." I would even go so far as to say that I relish being on the receiving end of casual haiku; I am, in short, in the Jarrellian position of audience member.

***
So setting to my curatorial task to find East Bank poets, I decided to solicit haiku from people. But fromwhom? I had some exposure to Nick Virgilio, regarded by many as the preëminent American haiku master. In our shared hometown of Camden, NJ, where I attended Rutgers University, I had a job shelving bound perdiodicals at the library. Mornings, I would occasionally see Mr. Virgilio walking around: a stocky, bald man, who my supervisor would point out as "that great poet." I would sit in a corner desk, watching this stranger scribbing on a pad as the sun hit his carrell on the the East side, facing the Ben Franklin Bridge.

But Nick Virgilio left this mortal coil years ago. Someday, I may get to see his papers at my alma mater, but for now, I was stuck for haiku.

Most of my poet friends, I assumed, had written haiku or tanka at some point, and I was right, but that would have been boring. The poems of the moonlighting free verse writer, like most poets who reserve a subject for a particular form, such as a sonnet for a dog, smack of either a lost weekend or, yes, as I would call it, poetic condescension. What I needed was immediate poetry, not the kind that is slave to a form; rather, one from the surprises of limitation, adapting to our non-musical, non-pictographic language.

So a second question arose. Why not ask famous people? Pure genius! What could be more inspiring than non-poets writing poetry for our humble literary webzine?

On problem: I don't know any famous people. Besides my Uncle Tom's friend Tim Watters,

who appears as a Bill Clinton impersonator on the Jay Leno show and at industry conventions (that's him up there), I knew nada, none, zippo famous people. So I did what any red-blooded literary webzine editor would do: I hit the search engines.

***
There are random citizens who feel compelled to post famous people's E-mail addresses. This is true. These are pages you may have come across yourself, pages authored by business majors from the Midwest who, apropos of nothing, post porn queen Ginger Lynn's E-mail address. Or, more diabolically, post her fake E-mail address, all as some kind of entry-level situationist art project.

My own exercise, I reassured myself, was at least as genuinely eccentric as that. Famous People Haiku! The idea was interesting, and, yes, benevolently condescending to all those concerned. I was excited to get my first response from Noam Chomsky, the world famous linguist from MIT, who wrote back,

     Dear Daniel Nester,

     Interesting idea but above my head, I'm afraid.

                  —Noam Chomsky

I sent this along to Tom Hartman, and asked him to take a break from his IKEA shopping essay and look at this our, first response. Were we doomed to failure?

Tom, ever the optimist, and using the eyes of the expert Tuesday-night darts player that he is, responded back to me within the hour. There was no personal message from him; instead, he had provided Chomsky with line breaks—

     Dear Daniel Nester,
     Interesting idea
     but beyond me, I'm afraid.

                  —Noam Chomsky

If you sound out the syllables of "idea" in line 2 (eye-dee-ya), stick a double-time Treach from Naughty by Nature skat in line 3, we've got ourselves a haiku. 5-7-6. Success! The Famous People Haiku venture had officially begun.

***
Not so fast. Vice President Al Gore gave me an automated response, and I have yet to receive a personal message from him. No surprise there, I thought; he's a busy man. Foo Fighters singer Dave Grohl didn't seem able to muster 17 syllables of verse; neither could Courtney Love or comedian David Brenner. There were countless others. Ginger Lynn's address was—surprise!—a bad address. Even Robert Pinsky, whose project of having teenage girls read from Emily Dickinson, and was at least part of my inspiration, stiffed me.

Finally, a bit of a Famous People Haiku coup occurred. A star did write back to me. But first, a bit of backstory.

A few months ago, I had caught a glimpse of the E-mail address of Rick Rockwell,

the comedian groom of the now-infamous Fox TV show, Who Wants To Marry a Multi-Millionaire? The ex-husband of Darva Conger had a surprisingly simple E-mail address, which I memorized from the TV set. I then started the practice of sending my group E-mails to Mr. Rockwell, as the main recipient; friends and family were then relegated to the "CC:" part of the message.

I figured this gave me some caché, and sent my CC: recipients a message: "Don't mess with me. I have friends who have been on television, and they are famous, you're not, and you're lucky to get this dispatch from Dan about my upcoming reading at Café Nonesuch this coming Tuesday."

The practice stuck, striking up a few conversations with non-famous friends (foolish mortals!) who inquired about my association with Rick, to which I would be coy and aloof, telling them that whatever association I had with Mr. Rockwell was mine and mine only, and No, I couldn't ask him for an autograph, and No, I will not ask Rick to play your nephew's bat mitvah, it just wouldn't be right.



***
One day, Rick himself wrote to me. "Please," he wrote, "don't pass along un-original [sic] E-Mails," by which he meant anything that had not come from my original hand. No more copies of the many pithy jokes and lewd .jpg files that came across my transom. I understood this: he was a busy man.

So my interactions with Rick over the past few months had become more infrequent. My desire to reach out to Rick, however, never waned. This Famous People Haiku project seemed to be the perfect place for me to ask him for a contribution, a fresh start to our correspondence. So I sent Rick a message, asking him for a poem.

Instead of giving him the rather form letter-ish request I had been sending to his contemporaries in the entertainment world, however, I tried to customize the note, the kind of hand-written, intimate memo you'd send to a dear colleague. I would ask you then to read the below-quoted message in that context: One writer asking another writer friend.

     To: Rick Rockwell
     From: Daniel Nester
     Subject: Haiku

     Rick -- Please write me a haiku for my literary magazine.
     You can just E-mail it back to me. It's 5-7-5, in case ya forgot!!!

     Regards,
     Dan

Some days passed, then a week. Then, the moment—the name in the Hotmail Inbox, the click, the wait for the 56k connection to engage in the server's buttressed message—Rick's haiku—

      Dan --
      Please send me check for a million dollars for my bank account.
      You can just mail it back to me. It's six zeros, case ya forgot!!!

      Thanks in advance,
      Rick

***
I was crushed. My original message had been pasted below, as if in a rush. The note must have taken only a few seconds of Rick's time, but its words cut through me for hours. And what's worse, it didn't scan! No emendation, no dubious syllabic compression could transform this E-mail into tanka, haiku, ghazal, whatever. Even Tom, taking another charitable break from IKEA essay writing, was stumped.

And the words themselves were awkward—"for" my bank account should have been "to," for instance. Clearly sub-par material. No Rick Rockwell Famous People Haiku for LPZ; I felt, frankly, condescended to.

Building up the courage, I sent Rick back a message, a simple ditty in—surprising even myself—haiku form—

     Rick wants a million
     smackeroonies sent "for" him
     my maxed Visa cries

***
As I clicked the Send button, sending my original, immediately composed verse across the web and back to a famous person, I suddenly felt like the magician in the king's court, another entertainer given his few seconds on the cold marble in the castle. Slightly nervous now, I await for Rick's evaluation, knowing that someday, I, too, might be a multi-millionaire, I, too, might be able to marry a bleach-blonde nurse's aide. I too, might have my moment in the sun. This is America, after all, and with this whole interactive universe, we've only started to interpret and grasp how literary webzines might democratize all our endeavors. And yes, all people will be able to condescend to each other, even in our poetry.