Slice of Life on Wry
by Susan McLean
Claudia Gary is a composer of chamber music and art songs, a visual artist, a writer on health and science, and a writer, teacher, and editor of poetry. The wide range of her interests leads to an equally wide range in her poems’ subjects, but they tend to be grounded in daily experience. You have only to read the title of “Bikini Buyer’s Remorse” to know where the poet is coming from, but the body of the poem does not disappoint. It concludes:
Well, here’s the bottom of it:
I cannot ever love it.
It leaves too much exposed,
And there’s the matter closed.
(from Bikini Buyer’s Remorse and Other Skimpy Poems)
Claudia Gary’s wit and precision often shine brightest in such epigrammatic poems, which capture an immediately understandable reaction to a contemporary predicament. And she can easily write a whole series of them, as in “Dating Ditties,” her observations on various indignities of the modern dating scene, including everything from having a potential date question the currency of her photo on a dating site (“Fact-Checking”) to having a well-meaning nurse stuff her pocketbook with condoms (“A Senior Gets Tested for STDs”) to becoming the target of romance scams from online grifters (“Rigged”). In the best of her epigrams, the punch line has deadpan timing worthy of a comedian:
The NSA replies to allegations of “pillow talk” surveillance
We know you’re not a terrorist.
We hate this drastic measure
but hope our needs can coexist.
We feel your pain. And pleasure.
Though she frequently uses rhyme and meter, she does not limit herself to the most common poetic forms. In “XO” and “Mother’s Mantras, 1968,” she experiments with the extremely short lines of accentual dimeter; in “Road Trip,” each stanza is a haiku; and in “Spectator Sportsmanship” she uses the extremely unusual pattern of alternating seven-beat lines with three-beat lines. Most of her verse is written in conversational iambic or accentual meter, but she also uses anapestic meter adeptly, both in limericks and in other short pieces, such as “Agreeing to Disagree.”
For any writer of humorous poetry, the element of surprise is key. Gary is good at noticing what is often overlooked. In “Schadenfreud(e),” she notes about Sigmund Freud that “his name translates to ‘joy,’ but incompletely” (from Humor Me). She knows that if you are going to use a frank word for a laugh, it should be the second word, not the first, in a rhymed pair:
Lactose Intolerance
Latinate nomenclature sure adds class:
I used to have to say, “Milk gives me gas.”
(from Humor Me)
Likewise, when using an unusual rhyme word, she knows it will have the greatest impact if it occurs last:
Upon Having Corrected an Accountant>
A crustacean’s demeanor is awful
When confronted for actions unlawful.
Be prepared for a jab
From the soft-centered crab,
Though the battle may save you a clawful.
(from Humor Me)
Her wit is particularly suited to short poems, but Gary also shines in longer verse forms. Her sonnet “Song of the Diarist’s Wife” starts with the line “There is no need to padlock your poor journal,” disclaiming any interest in the husband’s past lovers or any other “juicy inside story,” and it ends:
However, if it’s me you write about,
then, hang it all—that is worth finding out.
(from Humor Me)
Her villanelle “The Topiarist” has a clever parallel between the helical shape of the shrubbery and the alternating repeating lines of the villanelle itself. On the page, the poem itself looks a bit like a tall shrub crafted into layered segments.
The Topiarist
for Gloria
Out of a stately helical display
of shrubbery, new leaves poke into view:
The topiarist has been called away
or so I hope. Maybe his mind’s astray,
letting once-hidden branches reach askew
out of a stately helical display.
Dignified structures spiked with disarray
regress to common unschooled English yew.
The topiarist has been called away
to shape his own life, and his protégé
has found its sense of humor. Look what grew
out of a stately helical display:
Stalks make alarming gestures as they sway
in wind, claiming the recognition due
the topiarist. He’s been called away
and suddenly each leaf’s on holiday.
A gentle spiral yields to curlicue
out of a stately helix: Let us play!
The topiarist has been called away.
(from Humor Me)
Gary is good at varying the meaning of the repeating lines with punctuation and with the way those lines connect to what precedes or follows them. Yet notice how, toward the end, the repeating lines themselves start to vary more, just like the shrub that has started to go a little wild.
It has become almost a cliché to observe that humor often comes out of experiences that are dark or sad. Readers will pick up hints of family friction in “Mother’s Mantras, 1968,” in which the mother offers a dispiriting list of contradictory do’s and don’ts that seem designed to turn the daughter into an a decorous people-pleasing cipher. The ironic “Parental Harvest” shows parent-offspring conflict from the other end, with a mother who takes consolation from having two children, so that when one disappoints, the other looks better.
Some writers of light verse write only humorous poems; others run the whole gamut from dark to light. Claudia Gary is one of the latter poets. Her nonhumorous verse is just as accomplished as her light verse. In “The Snowsuit Photograph,” for instance, she recalls herself and her cousin Marji at their grandmother’s house when they were children, bundled up in snowsuits and waiting to descend “into the frosted sheet cake of her garden” (from Humor Me). In “Phonograph,” after enumerating the delicate ways one used to have to clean a phonograph needle and vinyl record before lightly setting the needle into the groove, she ends the sonnet:
you must remember! For the way you trace
the path of every melody I store
shows gentleness I’ve never known before.
(from Humor Me)
What an unusual and effective metaphor in a love poem, in which it is so hard to find new ways to convey age-old feelings.
Claudia Gary is not just a clear-eyed ironist, a wit, a thinker, and an adept and versatile poet, but also one of the hardest-working poets I know. She is constantly teaching and organizing poetry workshops, attending and participating in poetry readings and conferences, serving as an editorial advisor at New Verse Review, and writing and revising new poems. It is easy for poets to withdraw into their own world, but Gary is an engaged citizen of this one. Instead of writing offerings to Portentous, the god of prizewinning, she writes down-to-earth and funny poems that can speak to any reader.
Susan McLean, a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University, is the author of two poetry books: The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife. A third book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.