Get Serious

by Jefferson Carter

New & Selected Poems

Genres: Poetry

84 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Get Serious, he says. And he is dead serious behind these often funny, sometimes irreverent, sometimes moving poems. Short and to the point. Most definitely to the point, a very sharp point. Oh how quickly this poet can slip in the knife, while all the while you’re enjoying his well-limned images or smiling at a wisecrack. Gotcha!

[Mia Tryst · Rating 5 out of 5]

Life Poetry: A Review of Get Serious by Jefferson Carter

It’s been a while since I have read a book of poems, in this case—GET SERIOUS by Jefferson Carter — in one sitting and thoroughly enjoyed it to the extent I went back and re-read some of the poems again. I will most likely purchase a few more books by Jefferson. The last three books that kept me as engaged were: John Spaulding’s WALKING IN STONE, Bruce Weigl’s SONG OF NAPALM and Thomas Lynch’s THE SIN-EATER. I can’t exactly say that those books were “enjoyable” in the sense that they were uplifting but they left indelible impressions because I love poetry with an authentic voice and the above authors, with the inclusion of Jefferson Carter, have been added to my library.

To that end, I can tolerate almost every kind of poetry but boring, DOA poetry which to me is the worst kind of writing to commit and, sadly, most poetry falls into that “dull-as-poetry-by-Hollywood-celebrities” category. What makes for boring poetry is also stuff written by ad execs (jingles, Hallmark) and by just about everyone-else with a keyboard and a working vocabulary at his disposal. And let’s not forget the important stuff written by the corporate-branding school of smart-sounding, academia-approved poetry that makes me want to throw myself off the bridge because I might as well; it’d be preferable to contemplate ending my life than wading through one more textbook example of poetry posing as life and missing the experience entirely. Jefferson shows us how it’s done - pushing the boundaries of protocol, living life large and being able to write about it. Consider the first poem in his book, GET SERIOUS:

That trite motif
of class conflict, a job
at the dollar store, no more
whimsy, just the modest truth
of a found phrase, “Roller
Coaster Road” or “Stone Loop.”
Where was I? Not
in the middle of my life,
not like Dante entering
the profound wood. More like
a sit-down comedian, a communist
allergic to theory, a retired
bobsledder playing
ping-pong with his wife. ~ Stone Loop

That’s it; that’s most of Jefferson in a nutshell: a “sit-down comedian, a communist/allergic to theory” and a “retired bobsledder playing/ping-pong with wife.” Is he kidding? No, he’s serious. He’s a “someone” with a job at the dollar store. Is he for real? Maybe. In that first poem you get the impression that the narrator is playful, a nonconformist and an agent provocateur of sorts, although he skates dangerously close to MFA credentials with his passing nod to Dante. However the allusion to Dante’s, “Inferno” (and "Beowulf" later in the book) is excusable because most of the literate world is familiar with Dante’s work and so the reference is not an esoteric relic exhumed from the grave of a long-forgotten diseased figure in history. In short I love Jefferson’s work because the poems are to the point and tell it like it is:

I grip the stem of a pear
between my teeth and pull it out
like the pin of a grenade.
What a fucked up decade! ~ from Study of Three Pears

Jefferson is authentic. Some might say he’s politically incorrect and unapologetic but there’s irony in being able to pull off both well:

Not one Apache
in this audience
listening to the white man
tell stories
about Cochise.
Easy irony? I know, ~ An Apology for Wannabes

There is play and playfulness in his work that keeps his poetry lighthearted:

Oh, buffcollared nightjar
little nipple cactus, oh,
superb beardtongue,

forgive my periods
of intense folding
& faulting. I peel

the organic label
off the apple & stick it
on the cat’s head. ~ Grindstone

It is one of my favorite poems in the book because the “organic label on the cat’s head” leaves me with that unexpected “what the! huh?” moment. Then there are the impossible bad boy images that come to mind:

Cliterature just rejected
my latest poems. ~ Victim Poetry

She’s almost 90, her forehead
like an uncloudy day. She must’ve
been a beautiful baby. Now
she farts during yoga, plow pose
cow-face pose, even corpse pose,
you can hear her backfiring like
an old Vespa among the scented
candles. ~ Helen

I heard Mick Jagger’s got
a small penis. I heard Anne Waldman
recite her 900-page feminist epic,
The lovis Trilogy. A friend suggested
a lapel pin, a crown of thorns, for anyone
who finishes it. . . ~ Hard Wired

Before anyone screams misogynist or sexist, anti-feminist or some such epithet to demean Jefferson’s work, accept that these are merely unflattering stream-of-consciousness narratives that are actually quite funny. I mean if you don’t take everything too seriously, Jefferson offers an outlet for howling mirth with his infernal teasing; it’s hard wired, claims the narrator.

Splice into the 1980s-90s when Robert Bly became the tribal leader of the Mythopoetic Men’s Movement, the underlying premise was that men were in fear of losing their masculinity due to industrialization, fatherless roles and lack of rites of passage to manhood. Workshops and retreats used story, shamanic work, drumming, dance, music to help the wounded male get back in touch with his emotional masculinity. It sounded dubious, if not outright silly. The Mythopoetic men’s movement? Men (and women) take note: The male libido is intact, virile and alive in Jefferson’s unabashed poetry:

I forgive my internal (I wanted
to say eternal) erection. We’re
hard-wired to respond to beauty. ~ Mall

Flapped around. Practiced
safe sex. Egg white
instead of semen. ~ What I Did in Heaven

No preening, no “narcissistic poetry” for the i-Cultivated world, Jefferson tackles life with poetry head on and yet, it’s not poetry trying to be poetry. With an economy of words, his outrageous farting yoga poses, the profane becomes illuminated and the beautiful, beknighted:

Leaping inside the Johnny-Jump-Up
a twisting bag of houndstooth check
like the pants of a winter visitor,
my son giggles as I bend my body
into position three of Surya
Namaskara, the salutation
to the sun. I breathe as if I believe
yoga will make me young, a faith like
letters to the editor or small checks
mailed to an honest politician. Too
skeptical to chant Om shanti shanti,
I stop & kiss my laughing son, breathing
his odor, a sweetness the world once had. ~ Johnny-Jump-Up

[Frank Jude · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jefferson Carter is a poet living in Tucson since 1954. For thirty years he taught full-time at Pima Community College, his last eighteen as Writing Department Chair. He’s a passionate volunteer for Sky Island Alliance, a local environmental organization as well as a long-time yogin. His work has appeared in journals like Carolina Quarterly, Sonora Review, Spork, Barrow Street, Cream City Review, and New Poets of the American West. In 1991, he won a Pima/Tucson Arts Council Fellowship. His fourth chapbook, Tough Love, won the Riverstone Poetry Press award. Sentimental Blue, his seventh chapbook, appeared in 2007 from Chax Press (Tucson).

Chax Press also published My Kind of Animal in 2010 as well as his recent collection of poetry, Get Serious, which has been selected as one of the Southwest Books of the Year (2013), and deservedly so. W. David Laird had this to say about Get Serious: “Filled with fun as well as thoughtful innuendo…. Wonderful humor, terrific images, hardly a rhyme in sight.” Jefferson and I snickered a bit the other day before class, as I paraphrased Laird and said, “yeah, oodles of fun!”

Yes, I know Jefferson Carter; he takes my class at Tucson Yoga, so I will gladly cop to perhaps having some bias. In fact, I even make an “appearance” in his poem, “Cat Pose” where he writes: “My teacher likes/”hospice” as a metaphor/for life. Why maim/each other? We’re all/patients here.” But I didn’t HAVE to write this review, after all; I could have merely ignored the fact that I had read it! And despite the reference to humor (which is certainly there; reading one of his poems in the Tucson Museum of Art’s café garden, I laughed out loud, nearly spewing my cappuccino out my nose!), one of the things I appreciate about Jefferson is how he plays such a wonderful curmudgeon. Maybe it’s because my dad was one, or maybe because I harbor an inner curmudgeon myself, but I enjoy a bit of feisty, crustiness and cynicism. I especially appreciate when he tells us that his wife, perhaps exasperated by his “negativity,” tells him: “You know… if you were happier, you’d be happier.” All this works because you don’t have to have Jefferson placed right in front of you as you lead a yoga class to see how obvious this crustiness is but a soft coating over the heart of a romantic, replete with a compassionate response to, and acknowledgement of duhkha. At times, the poet he most reminds me of is Billy Collins, but a more mordant, twisted, even punk Collins.

Carter is not afraid to touch upon subjects that many would shy away from, and offered especially from his sometimes willfully politically incorrect perspective. This isn’t to say he’s some kind of bigot, racist, sexist, right-winger. Far from it! His politics seem to be very much of the leftist persuasion; he just doesn’t necessarily honor the left’s sacred cows either.

He is out-and-out ascerbic in a poem like “American Ingenuity,” or “An Apology For Wannabes” where he writes:

In this Age
of Irony, let me,
as one of our
political sock puppets
used to say, let me
say this about that –
without us,
the lessons you
learn from history
would be noisy
as a marching band
& empty as a Kleenex box
on the table
outside some senator’s
office door.

Whew! I just LOVE the bite of that language. And then he can completely sucker-punch you with the tenderness of “Johnny-Jump-Up”

… my son giggles as I bend my body
into position three of Surya
Namaskara, the salutation
to the sun. I breathe as if I believe
yoga will make me young, a faith like
letters to the editor or small checks
mailed to an honest politician. Too
skeptical to chant Om Shanti Shanti,
I stop and kiss my laughing son, breathing
his odor, a sweetness the world once had.

I read that poem and my heart breaks with recognition. (Jefferson has written a whole collection, None of This Will Kill Me, about fatherhood).

Jefferson writes a lot about his cats and dogs, too, from waking up “eye-to-eye with the cat’s anus” to damning anyone who would deny his dog a soul. There’s also the poems where humor and political incorrectness can come together like in the deliciously funny “Land Of The Pharaohs” where we get to see Jefferson, who “loves being called ‘brother’ by black men” at a poetry reading saying: “…let me lay something white & uptight on you brothers.”

"I recite my poem
about Martians & Geiger counters,
its conclusion an ironic invitation
to Jesus to drop by some morning
for coffee. They hate it."

I cannot hold back my laughter visualizing the scene! Or again in “Thunder” when he imagines the inner life of his dog, “half-blind, diabetic, fat as a woodchuck,” burrowing into his bed between him and his wife,

“trembling like she’s never heard
thunder before. Maybe she hasn’t
she lives so much in the moment.
Here’s her day: I was in. Now I’m out.
I was out. Now I’m in. You going
to eat that? You going to eat that?
I’ll eat that! Here’s her night so far:
What’s that? Thunder. What’s that?
Thunder. What’s that? Thunder."

The collection ends with “Helen,” one of the sweetest, most honest yoga poems I’ve ever read, with none of the sticky sentimental treacle or portentous symbolism that is so often found in contemporary yoga poetry. It’s about a 90-year old yoga practitioner who farts throughout class, “backfiring like/an old Vespa among the scented/candles.”

"Nobody laughs. Certainly
not me. No jokes about gasasana,
the five inner winds, the vibrations
of the blissful sheath. I’m practicing
ujaiyi breath, pretending I’m fogging
a mirror, imagining my blurred reflection,
which is almost nothing & preparing
to bow & say the divine in me
bows to the divine in you."

He manages to get it both ways, getting the laughs and the sincerity and reverence.
Jefferson complains that nobody says “Go, cat go” anymore.
Well, Jefferson, GO CAT, GO!


If you'd like to order this book, go to www.chax.org

[Joan Colby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Carter’s poems are sharp, observant and engaged. No ivory towerist, he’s in the arena with the locals flinging razor blades of brilliance and mockery. Here’s an example:
American Ingenuity
After a buffalo burger
& some butter lettuce,
triple washed, I’m ready
to refinance the house.
I can’t sleep nights,
coveting the sudden wealth
of someone like Ragged Dick
the bootblack, a fictional
character, but still…

I’d vote Socialist. I can’t sleep,
concocting get-rich-quick schemes;
a great tasting colonoscopy prep.
Or Hasta Yoga, copywriting,
like Mr. Bikram, ancient asanas,
the ones that stretch wrist & fingers,
yoga for signatories. I’d vote
Socialist. My best idea yet,
lavender-scented formaldehyde.

Carter’s poems, while often sarcastic, are never cruel; their message is cautionary. One should not take them lightly. One last observation: time has enhanced Carter’s poetry—ever more vivid, cutting and, under that hard shimmer, a layer of the truest sentiment, that which dares the heart to care.

[Eric Shaffer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Another excellent volume from a man who has the clearest voice and vision in Arizona.