The Desert Mermaid

 

妹 is having writerly problems.

 

Despite my careful warnings, she has wound up in the same shite literary magazine class I was in back in high school. “Don’t do it!” I told her. “They worship that E.E. Cummings asshole and compete to see who can be the most pretentious and depressed!* It’s a pseudointellectual sham, I tell you! And the football coach runs the show!”

 

She didn’t believe me, poor soul.

 

So I got back from Africa and was treated to a tirade. “Dammit, you were right! These people are insufferable! God, everything I do, everything I say, none of it is Deep or Meaningful enough!”

 

Some things never change.

 

Unlike me, 妹 is sticking with it, because she wants it for her college apps. Like me, however, she has become jaded and cynical. She has begun writing down random phrases and submitting them as poems to see what the others will say about them in critique, and she tells me stories about the responses. Also, she keeps writing limericks instead of SRS PTRY, which totally pisses everyone off. Literature is not about enjoyment, dammit! Literature is about the deep inner pain and tormet of the soul! Also, about how men suck!

 

I do not get poetry. I like pretty shiny images, like Keats’ poem about Autumn. Set it to music, and I will love a lot of imagery and strange wording. However, I am hopelessly and belligerently plebeian about things like free verse. I like prose, and if I am going to write something not-prose, dammit it’d better have meter and rhyme, like “The Raven” (it does not have to be necessarily happy. I like “The Raven” as well as “Jabberwocky” and anything by Shel Silverstein). And none of that Emily Dickinson business with her “revolutionary and unusual” rhyme scheme, because what they’re trying to put delicately when they say that is that Emily Dickinson does not understand rhymes. Any attempt at Depth will just annoy the hell out of me.  Give me a backwards rhyme any day.

 

It’s good to know that my sister feels the same way.  We can say it’s genetic, like how cilantro tastes like soap to some people (me and Dad). It’s a taste thing, and there’s no accounting for taste!

 

That’s what we remind ourselves when people critique her poems.  Because otherwise there would be violence.

 

 

妹: How does limerick meter go again?

Amelia: Hell, I dunno how to say it. Here, I’ll just give you an example!

“Ian McKellen heard one MP say,

‘Homosexuals have lost their way!’

Then said, ‘Will you sign

This new book of mine?’

So Ian wrote ‘Fuck you, I’m gay!’”***

 

 

*I don’t know why they tried so hard to be depressed. Maybe they thought it made you Deep. I felt like I was cheating, because that was the year I really was depressed, without having to work at it. Plus, I failed at it: I kept writing parodies of “The Raven” about computers crashing or poems about how cool astronomy is, while all the other people who weren’t having nervous breakdowns and sobbing fits in the middle of class** were writing about running the silky razor along their skin so they could bleed black rose petals into a pool of their tears or something. Or about how men suck. 

 

**That was a fun year.

 

***True story.

… In retrospect, probably qualifies as a mixed message when you bounce into the University Counselling Center, grin at the receptionist, and brightly say, “Hi!  I’m going to Kenya this fall! I have clinical depression, though, so I need to talk to a counsellor about coping strategies, okay?” Agreeing to ‘anytime this week,’ sitting down and snickering at a Terry Pratchett book while they check their schedule, and then waving happily and saying “Have a good day! See you tomorrow!” only cloud the issue further.

 

It’s like having Sunny the Care Bear walk into your office and say, “Hi!  I live in a rainbow world of clouds! Sometimes I have bad thoughts of everlasting misery and the finality of death! Are those lollipops for anybody?”

 
Counselling centers must be a barrel of laughs to manage.