Ah, a poem and a response poem—a tried and true unofficial pairing. I love both of these poems by Elliot Fried and Susan Thurston; they are full of the kind of imagery that only comes after staring and pondering (and ogling in this case) others for hours. For instance, Elliot Fried writes of the waitresses: “Their perky breasts hover over potatoes/like jets coming in to LAX/hang above the suburbs—”; Susan Thurston’s observation of mechanics is that “I feel their hands/roughened by spark plugs and washer fluid/yet sweetened by overflowing oil pans/slide over me.”). And what’s more, they’re delightfully dirty! The words are crisp and full of a wonderful repetition of sounds (count the “g” and “b” sounds in just five words in line 24 of Susan Thurston’s poem: “grease smudged bad boy grins”; Elliot Fried for his part uses phrases like “cream-cheese cool” and “buttons creases burgers buns”). If you match these two poems up, side by side, you can see that Thurston is careful to respond to and match Fried’s poem (lines such as “I know them.” are in both, and “Daily I fall in love with waitresses./They are Thousand Island dreams” is matched by “Daily I fall in love with mechanics./They are better than Free Air”), but her poem is not identical. Her ideas are stretched out longer and her poem is, as a result, much longer. Susan Thurston tries to make the poem her own.
But the thing I love most about these two poems is that they are simply fun. (Much like Tom C. Hunley’s “The Dental Hygienist.”)
If you’re struggling with writing poetry, try writing a response to a modern or contemporary poem. Be careful to match up the poem like Thurston, but try make it your own. We’ll certainly be doing this in the Introduction to Creative Writing class I’m teaching. Also check out Garrison Keillor reading these poems by Elliot Fried and Susan Thurston, as well as other response poems (William Carlos Williams’s famous poem about eating the plums in the icebox—“This is Just to Say”—inspired a poem of the same name by Erica-Lynn Gambino).
-R
