It was those tough Italian kids with the pretty names--DiOrio, DelVecchio, Policarpio--who taught me to love poetry. If I told any one of them he had a pretty anything, I’d get a metaphor for my trouble: a knuckle sandwich; a brand new asshole; my ass kicked into next week.
Assonance & F-Bombs:
Of ass-onance they were overly fond, those Roman poets spouting their smoke rings out behind the junior high--smoke rings that were beautiful and true and rhymed perfectly with the decrescendo O’s of their last names. F-bombs sprinkled their idiom like commas. And there was a definite skill involved in employing them--in the best places, at the perfect intervals, as adjectives, adverbs, nouns, gerunds--a virtuosity, really, that had everything to do with rhythm, anaphora, creative use of grammar, and many other tools in the poetry toolkit.
Take, for example, the f-bomb’s most basic and familiar usage, in the imperative mood, which, metrically speaking, is usually a spondee: FUCK-YOU. But there is also the trochaic variation with the stress on the first syllable--FUCK-you--whose music and meaning are subtly different from the spondaic version. Of course the rejoinder to the trochaic FUCK-you is always either an iamb--fuck-YOU--or an anapest--no, fuck-YOU. Needless to say, the f-bomb makes the study of poetic meter feel a lot more contemporary and sexy, and far less fusty and old-fashioned than it ever was for those of us who were forced to learn it in the classroom all those effing years ago.
Of the Vernacular:
But don’t misunderstand me, I am not advocating the use of vulgar language in poetry. Well, not exactly. The thing is, one of the senses of vulgar is “of the vernacular,” or “of the common people,” and I do advocate a poetry that speaks to the common people, that speaks like the common people, the common people whose speech is full of naturally occurring music and found poetry, and yes, vulgarities; the common people whom we poets need to keep trying to win back from their unhappy places of exile where they no longer read poetry and where they “die miserably everyday for lack of what is found there.” Which sucks big time for them.
The Proper Fit of Word with Act:
I’m pretty sure the first time I encountered an f-bomb in a famous poem was when I was reading Philip Larkin’s Collected Poems and I came across the little gem called “This Be the Verse”:
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do…
I remember being surprised—that you could do that. And impressed—that he had. Larkin, after all, was a formalist. And a librarian. He’d won the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. And I couldn’t help wondering what the Queen thought about Larkin’s f-bombs exploding here and there among the tidily rhyming iambic tetrameter and pentameter stanzas. Then, a few pages on, I came across these opening lines from another famous poem of Larkin’s, “High Windows”:
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise…
I was shocked and delighted. And persuaded. And not long after finding Larkin’s fucks I came across Kim Addonizio’s poem with its titular “Fuck”:
There are people who will tell you
that using the word fuck in a poem
indicates a serious lapse
of taste, or imagination,
or both. It’s vulgar,
indecorous, an obscenity
that crashes down like an anvil
falling through a skylight
to land on a restaurant table,
on the white linen, the cut-glass vase of lilacs.
But if you were sitting
over coffee when the metal
hit your saucer like a missile,
wouldn’t that be the first thing
you’d say? …
Of course it’s not shocking anymore to drop an f-bomb in a poem. In fact, it’s practically de rigueur. We find them all the time now in the works of poets and writers writing today. Not only that, but they’re everywhere in our music and movies, in comedy and on cable, and rolling off the tongues of adolescents and grandmothers alike. But still, how and when one deploys an f-bomb in a poem--creatively, discriminatingly, and with no collateral damage to the poem—that is still the work of a poet. In Stephen Dunn’s poem “Decorum” he takes on exactly this question of how and when and where and whether or not to use the f-bomb in a poem. Here are the first three stanzas:
She wrote, “They were making love
up against a gymnasium wall,”
and another young woman in class,
serious enough to smile, said
“No, that’s fucking, they must
have been fucking,” to which many
agreed, pleased to have the proper fit
of word with act.
But an older woman, a wife, a mother,
famous in class for confusing grace
with decorum and carriage,
said the F-word would distract…
Of course, it’s only relatively recently that the f-bomb began to appear in the poetic canon, even though the common people have been using it in the most poetic and sublime ways for centuries. Scour the poetical works of a great dead poet like Wordsworth, who was prolific as fuck, and you won’t find a single f-bomb. Believe me, I’ve looked.
Granted, all those great dead poets were a product of their time--and their language--just as we are a product of ours. But the times they are a’changing and the language it is a’changing, too, because language is always changing, because language is alive--it isn’t dead like all those great dead poets--and it’s our job, as living poets, to make sure the language is as alive as we are.
That being said, those great dead poets are still worth reading, because once they were as alive as you and me, and they had what we might call a handle on the verbal. And we can still learn a shitload from them.
Written by Paul Hostovsky
Writer Bio: Paul Hostovsky (he/him/his) has won a Pushcart Prize, two Best of the Net Awards, the FutureCycle Poetry Book Prize, and has been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, The Writer's Almanac, and the Best American Poetry blog. His latest book of poems is PITCHING FOR THE APOSTATES (Kelsay, 2023).
Website: paulhostovsky.com