For a while Chris Toll (Baltimore poet, d. 2012) would send me lists of words to use as prompts for writing poems.
I spent much of this morning reading through our old emails and was struck by what a great correspondent he was. I was reminded that we frequently invited each other out for a meal, either at a sushi place near the University of Baltimore, in Hampden, or for lunch in the Inner Harbor, where we both worked. He and I went to see Mission Impossible 4 together, and he was annoyed that I didn’t like it. Later I saw Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows which I emailed to say that I liked a lot better, and Chris sent me a torrent of emails like:
1) Tom Cruise did all of his own stunts – even picking his own nose hair,
2) Iron Man mostly sat around in a beach chair and sipped Diet Coke. EVERY fight scene was done by a body double and Iron Man’s face was added later in “post-production.” And the.scene where Iron Man is a “lady of the evening”? – this scene was added because Iron Man has begun the process of gender realignment surgery.
the Ghost
He referred to himself as “the ghost,” insisted I write about him online as “my friend, the ghost.” His emails on this particular subject continued:
1) Tom Cruise put on his own toenail polish – every single day!
2) Iron Man had his toenail polish applied by a production assistant!
and
1) Tom Cruise received oral service from the cast six times a day – he was particularly fond of the “French assassin girl” and the “silly British bloke.”
2) Due to his surgery, Iron Man could not receive oral service from anyone. He had – how to put this delicately? – lost the forest and not yet gained the ocean. But he did enjoy his evening tickling sessions with Jude “My Word Is” Law.
Sometimes the truth hurts!!
There were others, and they got weirder and weirder. It must have been a slow time for him at work. (As he worked for a tax firm, he got really busy in February till April, but these emails came in December, 2011.) I never replied to them.
However, the lists he sent me did inspire me to write some pretty good poems. Here’s one of those emails:
here is your list of words for this week – i’ve already written my poem … the only rule is that you must use at least one word from the list in your poem. i will not rest until you are Poetry Editor of the New Yorker, until Publishing Genius is a multimillion dollar commercial empire, until Justin Sirois is First Assistant Copy Editor, until i am living in a Greenwich Village apartment with my European girlfriend (soon to be wife), and until i am writing a weekly column for the New Yorker called Musings! the words:
lonesome
wind
beautiful
heart
far
galaxy
grand
peculiar
yearn
cold fusion
transubstantiate
hurt
hunt
weep
sleep
pastures
dolphins
10 key calculator
keep
valley
I was able to use those words in a poem that was later published in the excellent journal, Sink. You can read it here. It begins:
Cold Fusion
If yr yearning heart is clogged up,
simply give me a beautiful call.
I can solve the hurt.
I am the grand master and
To be honest, I like the poem though it doesn’t resonate. But more than the poem I like the way it came about, from a weird friend emailing me weird words. When I showed him the poem had been published, he said “the thing about using random words is that they give mystery and grandeur to the poem – they are an army of shadows assembled on the darkling plain.”