Contrary to Popular Belief
by Melissa Balmain
Go ahead: try telling Daniel Galef what to write or not write.
“I’m very contrarian and competitive,” he says over Zoom, an impish smile curling above his free-range beard. “And I will often take any kind of proscription as a challenge.”
The old notion that you can’t find rhymes for “orange”? Galef has 15, starting with “door hinge,” then getting purposely preposterous. The antiquated view that you need a whole alphabet? His flash fiction “A Cad, a Decade Added, Be a Cad” uses just seven letters.
While Galef was earning his MFA at Florida State University, a workshop instructor sang the praises of action-driven plot. “He said, ‘You can begin a short story any way you want, except ‘I was sitting and thinking,’” Galef recalls. “I thought, OK, how am I going to write a short story where it’s interesting and productive to start with ‘I was sitting and thinking’?” And after sitting and thinking about it, Galef wrote it.
Publishing challenges, too, do not cow him.
As an undergraduate at Montreal’s McGill University, Galef launched “Project Asimov,” a secret plan to place his work in every one of the school’s 50-odd undergraduate publications and festivals. Among these were two newspapers, a business journal, and multiple student research journals. “In the end I think I got into about 35 of them,” he says, “some by lying wildly”—pretending, say, to be a law student so he could get into the law journal.
In more above-board efforts, he wrote three musicals, one of which won top honors at the McGill Drama Festival. And he got good at persuading editors to “publish things they don’t normally publish.” Take McGill’s environmental-sciences journal. Since Galef’s studies in philosophy and classics had given him no scientific expertise, he submitted photos for the journal’s cover: “They said no. I emailed back with examples of journals that had, like, a frontispiece poem, and said, ‘I think this is a wonderful tradition.’” Bingo: he was in.
Beyond Project Asimov, Galef’s work has appeared in dozens of places, online and off. Poetry journals, of course (Able Muse, Atlanta Review). Fiction journals and anthologies (Indiana Review, Best Small Fictions). Humor and satire venues (The American Bystander, NationalLampoon.com). Children’s magazines. Scholarly journals. A “journal of recreational linguistics” for which he has constructed puzzles. Even The New Yorker, where, despite staggering odds, Galef has racked up one win and one second-place in the weekly cartoon caption contest. Last but hardly least, his first poetry collection, Imaginary Sonnets, was published in 2023 by Able Muse Press.
And all before his 29th birthday.
Growing up in Oxford, Mississippi and Montclair, New Jersey, “in a very literate family, always around a lot of books and lots of literary events,” gave him a writerly leg up, he says. (His mother, Beth Weinhouse, is an editor, writer, and journalist. His father, the writer and editor David Galef, is a fellow Light fixture and featured poet.) “I think most people, if they write a short story in middle school, the best they can hope for is their parents don’t tell them it’s a stupid life plan [to become a writer]. I got some professional editing, all marked up in red pen.”
But legs up can take a person only so far. Though his dad encouraged him to submit to Light, it was Daniel Galef’s skill that got him into the journal’s final print issue at age 15. (One of his limericks from that debut is reprinted in his feature in this issue.) His rollicking, erudite verse has since brightened all but two of Light’s regular online issues, plus several editions of Poems of the Week. Many of Galef’s past poems in this magazine are too long to reprint here, and his feature is best read in one gulp. But the following sonnet (first published in Light and reprinted in his collection) makes a nice amuse-bouche of his wit:
George Auriol to a Patron at Le Chat Noir
“For it was Auriol who concocted the Chat Noir-Guide towards the end of 1887. The Guide provides, for every objet d’art and knick-knack purportedly on display in the cabaret, fantastical tales of provenance.”
—From Cabaret to Concert Hall, by Steve Moore Whiting
Come in, come in! Here, have a glass of beer:
The best in France—so says the Pope, you know.
I’ll seat you where he sits when he sups here,
beneath these poker-playing dogs (Van Gogh).
Don’t touch, the paint is fresh! I knew the model:
Lovely gal. Alsatian, I recall.
Her only vice, a weakness for the bottle;
poor dear! Not drink—the bottle, that was all.
These cups were looted from the sack of Troy
aboard the pirate Pinkbeard’s twelve-mast scow.
Our beer, which I can see you quite enjoy,
is brewed by tight-lipped monks who take a vow
to never speak a lie—I, as a boy,
was in the order. (I have left it now.)
Now an instructor at the University of Cincinnati, Galef is busy earning “this weird thing that shouldn’t exist, a PhD in creative writing.” He has joined Able Muse as an associate poetry editor. And he continues to buck literary trends and tips every chance he gets.
“I love sort of creaky, old-fashioned things and making references to pop culture from 1885 that no one is going to understand,” he says. “I make it very difficult for myself to publish anything. I’m continually seeking out the least-marketable-possible genres. But it’s fun. It’s not going to end up in The New Yorker”—he has cartoon captions for that, after all—“but you find a little niche, nerdy publication that also has the same tastes.”
In prose and in verse, Galef says, “I like witty or clever humor a lot, which is not quite the fashion at the moment. I like things that feel written, so in a sense artificial.”
Small wonder that his models include the likes of Gilbert and Sullivan, Dorothy Parker, Tom Lehrer, Allan Sherman, Shel Silverstein, Ogden Nash, and 30 Rock. Or that he has explored not just the sonnet, but forms ranging from the epigram to the ballad. “Why is the style that’s currently popular more interesting or productive,” he asks, “than the style Aristophanes or Sappho used? It worked for them. Has something happened in the intervening years that made it less useful or less interesting?”
Readers of his verse will have no trouble spotting the above-mentioned influences. Nor will they fail to notice that Galef doesn’t just seek challenges. He supplies them.
Sometimes he dares us to solve an orthographic puzzle (see his tour de force “Letters to an Editor,” in this issue). Other times, he playfully pelts us with arcane vocabulary (see “Shear, Pottery Or The Gazogene’s Exploded”). Most often, though, he weaves a brilliant tapestry of history and/or philosophy and/or science that sends us madly Googling. Nowhere is this truer than in his Imaginary Sonnets, a collection inspired by a book of the same name, and similar premise, by 19th-century writer Eugene Lee-Hamilton.
As Barbara Egel says in her Light review of Imaginary Sonnets, “This book is work! And I mean that in a good way. [The collection] is a whole master’s degree in Western Civilization, from Ancient Greece to recent memory. Each of these beautifully crafted sonnets is in the voice of some character or person to another person, animal, object, or idea. These run from the very familiar—Doris Day or Thayer’s Casey at the Bat—to the truly obscure, like Ignaz Semmelweiss, who promoted hand washing among doctors (I promise, there are handy footnotes for the who? ones), to the straight-up bizarre, as in ‘One Straight Line to Another,’ where the perils of being parallel are thoroughly explored.”
One voice you may not find in Imaginary Sonnets, or in any of his work, is Galef’s own. “At least as far as I can tell, I don’t think I’m the ‘I’ in any of my poems [or prose],” he says. He vastly prefers adopting a persona to getting personal. “It’s a sort of escapism. I am myself and don’t particularly feel a need to recapitulate my experiences and emotions in writing. When I write, I want to explore other situations [and places and experiences]. I think that’s more fun.”
Such explorations are so addictive that Galef has “not been successful in trying to stop writing imaginary sonnets.” He’s produced about 30 since the book came out, and still has a list of about 300 historical figures he’d love to channel. He also aims to write more sonnets on people who are still alive, and riff a bit on Internet memes. “It’s going to be another book.”
What else does Galef have up his flannel sleeve? As much as he can fit there. True to his McGill days, he says, “I definitely like the eclecticism of trying different kinds of things.” More plays are on his list. Maybe a movie. And definitely more children’s poetry.
“Kids memorize [poetry]; it’s new to them, and also it’s allowed to rhyme,” he says. “Even the mainstream children’s publications are publishing mostly rhyming poems.” Plus, unlike most literary venues, kids’ mags often pay. The dozen or so poems he has published in them have earned him more “than all the adult poems put together.”
One of those children’s poems, “The Centipede,” appeared in the prestigious and now sadly defunct The Caterpillar. “Would you like to hear it?” he asks.
Of course!
Galef promptly recites into the camera:
“The centipede, as any etymologist will tell you, derives from the
Greek word for one hundred, and, as any entomologist will tell
you, has exactly one hundred eyes and one hundred arms
and very few charms.
So it’s beautiful and transcendent and sublime (pretty great)
when a centipede falls in love and finds a mate—
when two centipedes see eye to eye to eye to eye to eye to eye…”
Does the poem then repeat “to eye” 94 more times? Yes, indeed. And does it follow up with “and run off together hand in hand in hand in hand in hand in hand” and repeat “in hand” 94 more times? You know it. (In his video-chat performance, Galef stops after a mere 10 eyes and maybe 50 hands.)
“I love to do that one at readings,” he says. “I do all of [the repetitions of “in hand”] just to watch people get the joke and laugh and then—‘Oh, my God, is he going to do all of them?’” At the end of such readings, he tells the audience he also has “a poem called ‘The Millipede.’”
Does he? (And, Oh, my God, is he about to recite it?)
Galef shakes his head: “So far it’s just a hypothetical poem made to scare people who know their classical roots.”
But through the Zoom pixels, in that ever-more-impish smile, you can almost see another challenge blooming.
“I think,” he says, “millipedes are nice.”