Enviable Mania: The Poems of Denise Duhamel (Part One of a Series)

I can still remember when I saw my first Denise Duhamel poem, The Difference Between Pepsi and the Pope, and my shock that someone could write such obnoxiously long lines. Here’s a link in which you can hear her breathless reading, as she races through the poem in the way the line suggests:

http://www.cortlandreview.com/features/02/12/index.html

How can she take up so much room on the page? I understood how Whitman could; he was an old dead poet—they always babbled. (This is probably a shameful to admit, but it wasn’t until graduate school that I read Whitman’s The Song of Myself. It always had looked long and boring. I've never been an intellectual. If SparkNotes had been around, I would have picked up a copy. That’s what I did for The Canterbury Tales.)

I don’t know why I thought such a dumb thing. Like a lot of undergraduates, I hadn’t read much poetry, and I didn’t feel like I need to really. I simply needed to see how long a poem should be. (Much like a needless term paper) And then go from there; I would eventually hit the end and be done.

*

In Duhamel’s new book Ka-Ching, she has a number of prose poems. I have a hunch why. Maybe the sheer length of her lines got so long she couldn’t manage them. Their sheer manic intensity didn’t allow her to pay attention. They sped past her.

*

I always get annoyed when someone describes Duhamel’s poems as campy. It’s a completely inaccurate description. Think back to Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp. One of her tenents states that for art to be camp, it must be oblivious to its own potential for comedy, enraptured by its own seriousness, its own self-importance. The comedy cannot be deliberate. Otherwise it’s either pretty much straight-up drama or comedy. Or a combination of the two. Not camp.

Why am I protective of her poems, from being labeled as camp? Camp isn’t a bad thing. Or is it?

Look at the first few stanzas of “Please Don’t Sit Like a Frog, Sit Like a Queen”:

Remember to pamper, remember to preen
The world doesn’t reward a pimply girl.
Don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen.

Buy a shampoo that gives your locks sheen.
If your hair is straight, get it curled.
Remember to pamper, remember to preen.

Keep your breath minty and your teeth white and clean.
Paint your nails so they glisten, ten pearls.
Don’t sit like a frog, sit like a queen.

Camp or Light Verse?

Light Verse, no doubt. And what’s wrong with Light Verse? A lot of people are scared of it. It means you may not take yourself seriously. Or them seriously, God forbid. These same people need to be reminded that Light Verse boasts its fair share of amazing practitioners. Like Auden. Like T.S. Eliot. Like E.E. Cummings. Like Dorothy Parker.

For some reason, though, camp feels beneath Light Verse.

But there I go again. “Beneath.” This may be why: camp thinks it’s doing one thing when in actually it’s doing another. Light Verse knows what it’s up to, so there’s nothing to laugh at. You laugh with. But isn't there something more real about being oblivious? Or is that just stupidity?

*