Culture Shock, and: Poetry Workshop

TWO POEMS by Jim Wayne Miller Culture Shock A friend of mine told me the other day two New York City actors came to this little Kentucky college town to work in an outdoor drama for the summer. After the first week of rehearsal they were both in a bad way. Culture shock. (They diagnosed their own cases.) The trouble was, like, after rehearsal, there wasn't anything to do! No lights, no noise, the little town was bleak, so empty, so unstimulating! Now a fellow from Pike County in Kentucky came over to act in the same summer show. After the first week he was down with a bad case, too. Culture shock. It wasn't all the people, all that constant talk, all that flatware clacking and tinkling in the dining hall. It was all those books in the library. He'd checked out an armload and ever since he'd been walking about, feverish, needing sleep, overstimulated! I walked by that library tonight and sat on a bench out front, remembering how, down in the stacks, static electricity used to hold the pages of books together, and how sparks would leap between my fingers and doorknobs, — remembering all the books I'd opened there that made my hair stand on end and whisper. The library sat there humming like a power substation. I don't know what to prescribe for the New York actors. But surely this isn't the first brown-out they've lived through. That fellow from Pike County will be all right, though. 59 You gradually acquire a tolerance for all that current. By the end of the summer I'll bet he'll be working in books the way experienced electricians handle a maze of many-colored wires. He'll have sparks arcing from one side of his skull to the other; he'll re-wire his whole head or, using a typewriter ribbon for a cable, jump a little juice and set a motor humming on a flat white piece of paper. Culture shock. That's what a library's for. I live for that tingle. Poetry Workshop (Another Lecture in the Series) You have to walk up on the blind side of the reader as you would a one-eyed mule in a pasture, and lay the poem on bridle over the ears, bits in the teeth. Yau have to satisfy the reader's habit, as Eliot thought. So come like the burglar in light fiction, with a nice piece of meat for the house-dog. Remember Othello at the end. About to be jailed, he starts a story: "In Aleppo once. . ." (They think of far away, long ago.) "Where a malignant and turban'd Turk "Beat a Venetian and traduc'd the state—" (Yes, yes, and then what happened? Tell.) "I took by th' throat the circumcised dog, "And smote him, thus."—Stabbing himself, Othello ends his story. Though Cassio suspected he would try that, Othello slipped the bit between their teeth. With that diverting piece of meat, the Turk, he robbed them of himself. So it's not what the poem says but what it does. You can talk about anything: burglars and house-dogs, turban'd Turks, great-hearted Moors. You can even throw in a one-eyed mule if you want to. 60 ...