Booyah… Still Famous
Back in May, I made a big deal about being famous. Scott Chaskey, poet, former agroecology proff, and steward of Quail Hill Farm wrote a book entitled This Common Ground: Seasons on an Organic Farm, in which I made a cameo. I haven’t been in a book-buying state of pocket for the past several months, but I finally stumbled across Scott’s book at Green Apple, used, and at a very comfortable price. I am now in a position to reveal that I am the mysterious Robert O. of pages 118-119, co-author of the epic poem The Sodyssey, as well as BUNZA’s Bob of pages 118 and 120. But the story as far as Scott’s book is concerned (and it’s an excellent book, as far as I’ve read — it’s engrossing enough that I’ll likely finish it tonight and go to work groggy tomorrow) is not the full story for me. Let’s take a walk down memory lane, shall we…?
The best formal educational experience of my life was the first semester of my freshman year with the Friends World Program: Deep experiential education, a tight sense of community, and a more-than-academic commitment to social causes combined to shake my world up, big-time. In many ways, that semester solidified half the person I am, now, and really brought out many of the aspects of the me that I still want to be (some of which I’ve lost track of along the way…).
Friends World doesn’t grade its students — instead, we received narrative evaluations based on the work displayed in a portfolio at the end of the semester. There’s a great, long story behind all this, and another great, long story that runs parallel, but I’ll stick to the basics for now: Two weeks before the end of the semester, I was persuaded to drive a school van down to Washington, DC for a field trip for a global economy class I did not take. In DC, I got us into a freeway accident, and then parked us in a neighbourhood where pretty much everything in the van was stolen. Including several laptops. Including a few complete portfolios. Including my laptop and my back-up disks — I had been expecting technical difficulty, not human intervention, to screw up my data, so I never thought to keep the two separate. With two weeks left to go in the semester, my portfolio was scrapped.
That semester, I had been taking Scott Chaskey’s agroecology class — one hour’s drive from Southampton to Amagansett, three hours of mucking about in the field and talking about how dirt works, and an hour’s drive back, every Monday. I loved it. Scott is a poet of no mean talent, and on a couple occasions he read us some of his published work. I, being the kind of smart-ass I was then (a slightly different variety from the smart-ass I am now), would make fun of his poems for not rhyming. Of course, I would also write haiku on fallen leaves to give to the girl who would later be my first love. When I lost my notes for my final project — a comparison of Roman agricultural methods and modern organic farming, emphasising how much two millennia’s knowledge has taught us about co-operating better with the Earth — I approached Scott about writing an epic poem about dirt, in its stead. From this was born my friend Erin’s and my magnum opus The Sodyssey:
I sing you the tale of Sodysseus
(That annelida oligochaetes,
And of that great quest for his brief-lost son,
Assisted by terranean deities.
But above all I sing of the glory
Of dirt, of the magical pow’rs of soil.
And in that, dear reader, shall our story
Bear worth, and score us good grades for our toil.And so our great hero in natal soil
Lay giving his sweet castings to the grime.
How innocent and beauteous is the worm,
Awrithing in his achordatal slime.
But ho! Here comes the farmer with his plow!
And through this blade the worm is vivisected.
The tillage of the earth tears him apart,
No more these once united halves connected.
And ver’ly I, the poet, hereby vouch,
Where former one, two voices cried out, “Ouch!”
Bad rhyme, bad metre, bad puns were, in large part, the point of The Sodyssey (it is dedicated, by ‘Two Poets Who Can Rhyme’ to Scott). Sodysseus, and his son, Tillemachus, are separated (in a very visceral sense) by Farmer Scott’s plow. En route to their reunion, they meet Homer the mole (ha. ha.), the Magic Mushroom, sophomoric microbes, and once again cross paths with Farmer Scott, who sings the ‘Compost Ballad’ (which Erin and I recorded in the bathroom of one of the Montauk suites). Of course, it’s also chock-full of information about Nitrogen, the roles played by microbes and worms, &c., and is accompanied by a FAQ explaining our numerous uses of poetic license. But mostly it was just about creating bad poetry.
Looking over The Sodyssey, now, I’m slightly embarrassed — had I known then what I know now about metre and form, I’d have made fun more intelligently. However, I miss the freedom of spirit of that time in my life (San Francisco hip is bringing me down, bra), and, though this is not what I’d expected, it’s somehow appropriate that The Sodyssey is the first piece of mine to ever make it into print. Scott’s book, page 119:
Sing hey for the life of an annelid!
Sing ho for the life of a nightcrawler!
Sing huzzah for the life of the soilèd worm,
Who himself sets the path he will follow!