The "needing to be liked" trap

(and, perhaps, a way to avoid it)

I was chuckling over the Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes (first published 1899) of Capt. Harry Graham the other day. You'll recall that this is the chap who writes polished little epigrams in which the speaker or protagonist reacts to some awful tragedy with inappropriate levity, self-interest or indifference. Like this:

In the drinking-well
(Which the plumber built her)
Aunt Eliza fell, --
We must buy a filter.

Or this:

O'er the rugged mountain's brow
Clara threw the twins she nursed,
And remarked, "I wonder now
Which will reach the bottom first?"

There are many,  many more; see here.  Thinking about them, two things came to mind. There have been many imitators, and nearly all fall well short. This is partly because they often don't match his metrical polish, but there is something else too — they hardly ever go far enough. When I read the Rhymes to my students and got them to write their own, I noticed that although they loved the transgressive frisson the poems gave them, they were hesitant to reproduce it themselves by imitating Graham's pose of brutal indifference. And nothing less will do; you can't just be vaguely catty or ever so slightly daring. You have to go far enough to create that momentary shock.

And that made me think of something else: the trap I think so many poets fall into of Needing To Be Liked. Poets have much in common with comedians, who also fall into this trap. In their case it blunts their edge and makes them sentimental (Robin Williams being a good example). With poets, it tends to manifest in an anxiety to come across as worthy and right-thinking, especially if they use the first person a lot, and a fear of uttering any sentiment that might shock or annoy a similarly right-thinking, liberal audience.

It's easy to see why they feel this way.  In the first place, readers and even many reviewers have an awful habit of supposing the word "I" in a poem means the poet,  and is uttering his or her own thoughts. Secondly, there do seem to be quite a lot of finger-wagging thought police about: I recall a review of a collection which included a poem in which a child was playing with a toy gun. The reviewer was indignant that the poet had neglected to include an explicit condemnation of "war toys", apparently oblivious to the fact that this had nothing to do with what the poem was actually about. Another poet caused a kerfuffle on social media, a few years back, by imagining Hitler as a young boy. Myself I would have thought it interesting to speculate on how a virtual tabula rasa turns into a monster, but no: seemingly some thought the mere choice of such subject matter automatically made one a fascist.

But the fact that we may be misunderstood by careless readers (some critics among them) does not mean poets should imitate spaniels, tongues hanging out for audience approval.  Even kind, liberal-minded people have dark thoughts sometimes, and poets should be ready both to acknowledge this in themselves and to make their readers think about it (as, for instance, Frederick Seidel does, not without getting into some trouble for it).

And in a small way, I think the sardonic captain can help us here. If you teach creative writing, introduce the Ruthless Rhymes to your students and get them to try writing their own. When they hold back, as they will at first, encourage them to be more transgressive, to see how far they can raise the shock quotient before their audience says "oh no, that's too much".

At least it might get them out of the habit of needing to be liked.