American Poems and the Art of Incongruous Juxtaposition -

On “American” Poems

Right now, there are plenty of poets writing about America’s legacies. Many poets are critical of American Empire. Many poets still celebrate what’s beautiful about this land. Name America, and your listener likely has a strong opinion about it.

But I am not interested, here, in espousing any position on America. Rather, I am interested in America as a land of incredible dissonances, of incongruous juxtapositions. I am interested in American literature as being a site of exploration in which these juxtapositions are named, celebrated, criticized, explored, complexified. And I am interested in “American” poems—not poems by Americans, but poems that are only made possible because of America’s complicated and entangled histories, and what those histories produce in poetry.

I also want to be clear that this is not an attempt to recreate American Exceptionalism. What happens in American poetry happens elsewhere: I seek only to use Americanness as a doorway into understanding new possibilities for poetry and for your own work.

The Art of Incongruous Juxtapositions

Juxtaposition is, in brief, the placing of ideas or images next to one another. We do it all the time in our work, often without thinking about it.

An “incongruous juxtaposition,” however, is something else. It’s a term that’s actually borrowed from the world of humor: the “incongruous juxtaposition theory” is the theory that comedy derives humor from a violation of expected norms, or from unexpected things being placed near one another.

You see this in the world of satire. Here’s a recent headline from The Onion:

Beer Delivery Driver Points Trembling Shotgun As Crowd Of Scottish Soccer Fans Close In

Not only do you have an unexpected set up, but you also have unexpected juxtapositions. An American associated with beer, semi-trucks, and shotguns? Sure, I know a thing or two about this. But he’s trying to keep drunk Scottish World Cup fans away? Now we’ve got unexpected entities sharing a line.

But incongruous juxtapositions offer incredible utility to poetry—American and otherwise; humorous and otherwise.

Poetry itself is a violation of norms.

Poetry itself is a violation of norms. By norms, I mean normative language: a poem attempts to expand the possibilities of words in order to say that which prose cannot. And incongruous juxtapositions are a strategy for making this possible, because they draw our attention to things that don’t go together, which results in asking, so why are they together?

I ran a workshop to this effect at the in-person poetry group I run. My freewriting prompt was only to write down images that reminded the writer of America. I made note of some of my favorite images people had produced, before even bringing up the topic of juxtaposition. Here are a few of them:

An abundance of cereal mascots down a grocery store celebrity aisle.
“Ordering an ice water medium-rare.”
Open air outlet malls. (How many categories of purchases can you make at one of those?)
Cicadas chirping underneath the full moon, obscured by a freeway LED advertisement for a superchurch.
A girl with bleach-damaged buns and wearing PJs buying a mango flavored vape at the gas station.
A churro dog (as in, a hot dog encased in a churro).

So, already we have images that are themselves incongruous juxtapositions, or else warehouses of incongruity. They manage to be both hilarious and real—believably absurd.

Let’s look at this in action now, in a poem whose Americanness is made possible by incongruity.

“Aubade for the Habana Inn” by Chrysanthemum

Retrieved here.

Before adolescence reached me, each morning
I marveled past the Habana Inn, a degenerate haven
hidden plainly off Route 66. My cheeks clenched
as I caught in the rearview oblique glimpses
of men, their beards groomed to signal discretion.
39th and Penn: a revolving sleuth of leathered pickups,
hot rods in cruise control. I numbered plates
skipping town from out-of-state
as we got groceries at what was Homeland,
which once was Safeway, but now is Goodwill.
Braum’s banana split as alibi, I tracked the bears
shuffling by. I swooned, swore I’d gussy up,
brave mountaintops when I came of age,
embrace my guts. Daddies and sissies alike
pilgrimage toward the obvious: The Village.
Boystown. P-town. WeHo. Any Christopher Street.
I exhausted every imaginable vulgarity stewing beyond the block:
cowboys, truckers, pastors, oh my. Had I snuck a peek,
unveiled the skirt, I’d find naught but night: damp
technicolor carpets, hot tub swimmers, drapes
finished raw, ultraviolet ripe for new owners
—an LA lift to keep the grit, strip the must,
and redevelop. No longer is the Habana. I mourn
each time a classic logo debuts a thin sans-serif makeover—
the pylon sunrise marking the resort, now absent
from the I-44 skyline. Maybe it’s better
to clean up, chlorinate the pool more regular.
I wouldn’t know. I’m still blue in the face,
staring out the dash, yearning for first light,
ignorant of what I lost without ever coming in.

Incongruous juxtapositions are inevitable in a poem like this, where the landscape of the American underground is being catalogued, documented. The following sets of images coexist:

groceries at what was Homeland, / which once was Safeway, but now is Goodwill.
cowboys, truckers, pastors, oh my.
damp / technicolor carpets, hot tub swimmers, drapes / finished raw, ultraviolet ripe for new owners
I mourn / each time a classic logo debuts a thin sans-serif makeover— / the pylon sunrise marking the resort, now absent / from the I-44 skyline.

Even the title itself is incongruous. An aubade is a poem for a lover departing at sunrise; here, the sun rises on the Habana Inn, yes, and also on the speaker’s life, whose coming-of-queer-identity occurs with the witness she bears for a seedy Anytown, America.

We also get a poem that observes America’s palimpsest: the cycle of businesses and identities that move through our physical maps. (I feel this most acutely when I walk into the CVS that occupies a historic, neoclassical style bank, or when I enter a pizza chain shop that used to be a legendary nightclub.)

There’s a sense of the many lives people have lived pulsing beneath our own, in a land whose ownership has changed many hands, many times over—often forcefully; often because of “manifest destiny,” “market forces,” or other such excuses. Those old lives occupy the same space as ours do, an embodied juxtaposition of incongruities: “Ignorant of what I lost without ever coming in.”

That’s what makes this poem American. Not its incongruities alone, and not just the fact that an American poet is meditating on American themes, but because the poem reveals something about an experience that is true to American life.

Is it true elsewhere? Absolutely. The predictability of change and the sense of organized chaos recur throughout the history of civilization.

But, to borrow the phrase I used earlier, what feels distinctly American is a sense of “incredible dissonances.” What I experience in successful American poems is an attempt to hold space for those dissonances, either by resolving them or accommodating their coexistence, and certainly by understanding them as part of what an American identity is.

Other Examples of American Poems

“Howl” by Allan Ginsberg might be the archetype of poetry that warehouses incredible dissonances. T. S. Eliot’s”The Waste Land” is a parallel example 30 years prior to “Howl,” though that poem is arguably more European in its sentiments.

Here are some other poems that demonstrate what I mean by fabulous incongruity:

What Does This Suggest for Poetry—American or Otherwise?

I love poetry for its capaciousness. Which has nothing to do with the poem’s length or word count: plenty of short poems do a better job of containing big ideas than long poems do.

Or, I like the way poet Stephen Dunn framed it:

“[Poetry] articulates and enacts the difficult-to-say, the half-known; it finds a music and a shape, offers an arrangement, if you will, of words and sentences that better approximate the way things are.”

Poetry has this ability to approximate the way things are in American life, which, from my vantage point, is a space of juxtapositions that are incongruous to the point of dissonance. As a child, a churro dog would not have surprised me. Nor would any heinous combination of sodas (Baja Blast 7 Up and diet root beer, anyone?) surprise me. Or the sight of a gigantic Elmo walking on stilts past a choir of gay men on bleachers in ad-lit Times Square. (Oh, America, you land of big, bright children.)

Now, of course, I realize how distinctly absurd our juxtapositions are. Unexpected yes, and sometimes fun; also rather incessant and omnipresent within the 50 states.

What takeaways are here? A few, and I’ll present them to you in prompts, which have been crafted for you regardless of where you live in the world.

“American” Poetry Prompts

1. Write a poem that embodies your cognitive experience of the place you live.

“Cognitive experience” is intentionally vague. But think about how the place you live in impacts your psychology, and why. Think about the landscape, the people, the images that feel brightest in your mind. Think about your poem also being a world.

I’ve probably poisoned the well, here, with regard to American poets in this newsletter. But if you disagree with my framing of America as a place of dissonances and incongruities, I encourage you to disagree and to write a poem from your own experiences.

Or, maybe you want to write about your experience of the state or city you live in, or even your neighborhood, your house, your bedroom. Poetry holds space for any and all of it.

2. Write a poem that navigates the incredible dissonances you are forced to live or bear witness to.

I’ve used this framing with regard to America, but I know it is not unique to American life. We are all bearing witness to profound changes in this world, many of them profoundly disturbing. Sometimes these changes influence our lives; sometimes, the worst seems to be happening and our lives are strangely pleasant.

Or maybe you experience dissonance between the world you grew up in and the world you now live in. In any case, it is difficult to assign a linear narrative to the world and our lives in it. I think poetry has great capacity for that nonlinearity.

Find a place of dissonance, and write from it, imbuing your poem with what’s unexpectedly juxtaposed.

3. Write a poem that puts unalike things in the same space, and then explores the tension generated in this juxtaposition.

You can pick anything here. Orange juice and toothpaste; a Beethoven sonata at a boxing match; wearing a belt on your waist without pants; pigs in a sty wearing floral perfumes, etc.

Incongruous juxtapositions yield questions at aesthetic, narrative, and often political levels. How did these things end up occupying the same space? What implications arise from there?

The point of this exercise is to have fun and give your imagination free rein. Chances are, you’ll stumble into a poem you didn’t expect.