Mostly Mediocre, but Fraught with Peril

The 2.3 regular readers of this blog may know that I’ve got a minor pet project where I write poems reminiscent* of those found in Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology, only “updated” for today.

They’re mostly mediocre I will admit.

Masters had one clear advantage. Well, several**, if I’m honest:

1. He’s a good poet, where I am mediocre
2. The times he wrote in were less politically correct
3. Spoon River was a small town, or so I imagine (this being the time of the Rebellion Against the Small Town in American literature) and was relatively racially homogenous.

Maybe you see where I’m going.

I’m white. Whitey, probably. And a modern collection of epitaphs from a more modern, more urbanized Spoon River would necessarily call for a wider variety of epitaphs from dead people of various races. And while Masters occasionally threw in an epitaph from a Chinese resident of Spoon River and got away with it, I’m not certain in these more perilous times if a writer of my lowly caliber could get away with writing anything but more Whitey epitaphs. Because if I did attempt something more, ah, ethnic, there’d be hell to pay.

I’ve only done a handful of them, of which I’m mostly proud.

Elliott Finn

Ahmed Youssef

Rubinia deSpain

John Dickey

Marcus Jessup

BONUS: Albertus Mink

Of those six, I’ll let you guess which one has me the most nervous. No fair looking at the links first, because I express the nervousness on the particular epitaph.

What to do?

Make it a collection from more than Whitey, clearly. There are bound to be others out there interested in Spoon River Anthology, who could write for different characters with the ethnic equivalent of a doctor standing there watching them to take the curse off it.



And attention Kmart shoppers, this is not out of any desire to be politically correct or to avoid cries of cultural appropriation. Well, maybe a little of the last one. Remember the mediocre thing I mentioned earlier? Maybe a few of us mediocre poets of diverse backgrounds could work on this together. And we wouldn’t be restricted to writing only our race, but a trusting group could vet each others’ work and help steer the project out of the most troublesome waters. Or something like that.

So this won’t happen. Because I don’t know many other poets. And this is a niche product.

So for the meantime I’ll stick with my mediocrity, and point the critics to this post. Maybe they’ll get distracted by my wonderful spelling of “reminiscent” and forget everything else.

*This is my latest spelling bugaboo. I tend to want to toss in an extra “I,” so I’m trying not to do that anymore.

**This is not an all-inclusive list by any means. There are probably a few more reasons why ELM is a better poet and person than I am, but I just don’t have the time.