Your Mileage May Vary: An Introduction to My Next Book of Poetry “Pluck” (partially written)
Most everything humans produce is a gimmick.
You might think “gimmick” is a Yiddish word like “nebish,” “schmutz” or “zaftig,” but the term dates from 1910, meaning it’s slightly younger than my grandparents. Etymologists, in their wisdom, think it may be a derivative of gimcrack, or an anagram of magic.
A gimmick is a fudge, a cheat, or a short-cut, a stunt.
A celebrity endorsement is a gimmick. That celebrity on television doesn’t really use that hair care product nor do they own a term life policy from that insurance company. But we’ll believe Keith Hernandez or Sarah Jessica Parker over an unknown pitch person, every day of the week.
In 2007, the Radiohead album “In Rainbows” was made available online, with fans asked to pay whatever they think the music is worth. One third of them did not pay a single cent but the ensuing hype and publicity made it the Radiohead’s most profitable album.
In 1951, St. Louis Brown’s owner Bill Veeck signed 26 year old, 3 foot-7 inch tall Eddie Gaedel to a Major League contract of $15,400 ($100 per game). Gaedel was an evenly proportioned dwarf and Veeck hyped him as the World’s Smallest Professional Baseball Player.
Veeck had given Gaedel specific orders that he was not to swing at any pitch in his debut against the Detroit Tigers. Furthermore, he was to crouch low in his batting stance to minimize the size of the strike zone. Veeck’s gimmick worked: the grandstands were full and Gaedel managed an easy walk.
Gaedel was the ultimate winner in this arrangement. He cashed in on his new-found fame, booking TV and radio spots and even playing in an amateur game (striking out in that appearance), earning over $17,000 ($140,000 in today’s dollars) in just a few weeks.
Well I’m no Bill Veeck or Radiohead, and I’m perfectly content with the gray in my hair, and the unsightly dandruff. But I do use gimmicks in my books.
In “It Happens That Fast” my memoir of growing up in Santa Barbara, CA, I added “Mix Tape,” a set list of popular songs from 1958–1985 and “D is for Detective” a Sue-Grafton-themed Santa Barbara author reading list at the end of the book. A bit of gimmick on my part, worth an extra eight pages.
Last year, I teased out a 4,000 word essay about my ischemic stroke into a 62-page “mini” memoir called “The Guests” that would have made Bill Veeck proud of how compact it was at the plate. It’s a book, but barely.
In “The Principles of Composition” (2019), I included eight song lyrics to round out the 42 literary poems in my poetry manuscript, a padding factor of 16%, if you’re counting. Are they good song lyrics? Perhaps. Are they great poems? I’ll let you decide.
And now in this upcoming collection “Pluck,” I have designed a section at the end called “Stand-Up,” a place to warehouse my light verse, and show off my comedic skills since Netflix has given a comedy special to almost everyone on the planet, save me.
Poets are clever with word choice, occasionally with titles of poems and the closing stanzas. Where we are not so clever is in the packaging and promotion of our books.
We understand that “professional driver, closed course” and “see store for details” are part of the subtle gimmickry of muscle car manufacturers and smartphone retailers.
This collection is intended to bring a bit of that magic back, that verbal wizardry that makes you, the reader, feel you got what you paid for.
The subjects of this book are far-ranging (widowers, museums, cancer treatments), lyrically provocative (the elegant dance of workers on a loading dock), redemptive (the faded glory of newsrooms), and inquisitive(does the soul immediately depart from the body upon death?). Great care is taken with each line, each syllable, each individual sound (fricative and phoneme).
My goal as a poet is to sweep you, a passive shore hugger, into the current of a river, and take you hundreds of miles downstream, towards a great ocean. At least that, if not more.
Photo Credit: Leif Kurth, Minnehaha Rush
