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Explore poems read by the two authors in conversation with each other, then follow your own fish to unlock your own creativity, and share it with us.
Hello. This is Sue Boudreau, here with my friend and neighbour, Deborah Bachels Schmidt, your hosts for Follow A Fish, Poetry Conversations Inspiration Podcast. It's so good to be here after a sad trip to England. My dad finally passed away a few hours before I got there, and I'm going to be moving back as soon as I can sell up and book passage for me and Mitzi the dog, which is much more complex than you might think. We will be doing this and one more podcast to round out the second season, and then you will need to find a new poetry podcast.
Sue:We will leave some ideas in today's show notes, so you won't be too bereft. In the meantime, we have our monthly open mic on Sunday, June 21, 03:30, at the Good Table gathering space here in El Sobrante. And for more information, check out our website at curiositycatpodcast.com. We also will be hosting a generative workshop called Write Here, also at the gathering space at The Good Table on Sunday, June 28, where we'll be agreeing on a prompt, writing to it for twenty minutes, then coming back together to share what we came up with. I'm excited.
Sue:It's going to kick start my lazy creative process, and hopefully yours too. So this weekend, we are sharing funny, light hearted poems, with maybe a little something real buried within. Here's my poem now. It's called Antfall. Antagonise ants, not the kind married to your uncles or your father's sister who you never really liked.
Sue:Lay strange chemicals across their fulminating trails. Try baking powder, grated orange or lemon peel. Try wiping them up repeatedly with simple soap, or some other organic solution a not so simple solution. Do a fun series of experiments with syrup, to see if you can get them to describe a giant heart, reminding your husband how glad he is to have married you kitchen goddess that you are. But in the end, fuck it.
Sue:It's ant sticks and insecticide spray. Instant annihilation. Yay. I'm ashamed to not be that ashamed to admit. Ants well up through flooding cracks in the heaving soil.
Sue:Heaving is a relative term. The clay's slow swell means the doors close in the summer, but not in the fall rising like seen chaos threatening the surface order of everyday lives, driven by the organism's imperative to seek shelter and food. Natural selections taking place on the counter. In the coffee maker, they've invaded the sugar through a tiny gap in the seal of the jar, the kind of drama I so appreciate unfolding in front of my sleep deprived eyes. Maybe the best we can do in these strange circumstances is an obsession with the small distracting us from disasters that might really befall.
Deborah:Oh, so this one just makes me laugh out loud. It's just a hilarious poem. So light and funny and smart too. It's got some great word play. I mean, I think that's always what's called for in light verses that there are all these hidden tricks, and it comes off as very light, and it makes you laugh.
Deborah:But it really is so skillfully done, and that's part of what carries it. So right from the beginning with your aunt agonized aunts and then not the kind married to your uncles or your father's sister, you've got this wordplay going right away, Got a lot of fun rhyme. And it's in your signature way. It's not too in your face. For example, insecticide spray, instant annihilation.
Deborah:Yay. I think because it's not a predictable meter, but the rhyme is there, so it's not too obvious, but it's just fun. And so many surprises. For example, after the part about the incident annihilation. Oh, a little before that, stands before that, when you say, do a fun series of experiments with syrup to see if you can get them to describe a giant heart reminding your husband how glad he is to have married you, kitchen goddess that you are.
Deborah:I'm just thinking, you know, like, all those, what, fifties, sixties, seventies advice to women to dress in Saran wrap when he comes home so that you
Sue:can greet him at the door. Did you say Saran wrap?
Deborah:Apparently, that was a thing. I mean, all the crazy expectations that were I heard I
Sue:I this is kind of what you're talking about. I heard when in England, it was called Norwich, which means knickers off ready when I come home. Is that what you're talking about?
Deborah:Basically, yeah. They're visible package. You need unwrapping, you're visible, that's for sure. Oh my god, I've never heard of that. And then right after that, in the next stanza, you've got but in the end, fuck it, which is, like, totally unexpected and not like, like, goddess would say.
Deborah:So it just has this rolling of the floor. It's so good. I'd love to hear well, first of all, just a little word question. This word, fulminating, which I had I to look was sort of thinking it meant brewing, but it doesn't
Sue:It kinda it means brewing, but, like, really fast. Like, when you think about, I don't know, coke with Mentos in it, it fulminates.
Deborah:Bubbles
Sue:up. It bubbles up. Okay. Like a huge reaction that's foaming and bubbling is fulminating. And ants fulminate as well.
Sue:When they kind of well up from the ground and you've got this sudden invasion, it's called fulminating.
Deborah:Oh, wow. Well, that's a great use
Sue:of Although, I'm fairly sure that's true, but it could be a made up word by soup, such as moochie poochie for example, which turns out not to be an actual word.
Deborah:No way, really? Way.
Sue:A bit like fetch in Mean Girls,
Deborah:you know what So, yeah, when I looked it up, I did not come across that meaning, but it actually makes a lot of sense, and it also made me think of the word.
Sue:Wait. You didn't come across the meaning, so I did make it up.
Deborah:Well, unless I mean, maybe it's a specific ant biologist use of the term, you know? It wasn't on my online dictionary, but it might be somewhere.
Sue:See, this is an example of Deborah being incredibly kind. I will look it up and put it in the show notes, Okay.
Deborah:We will see. Well, I like it. And it made me think of formica, which is this Latin word for ant. So it really worked well in the context. I like it a lot.
Deborah:So can you describe what led you to come up with this?
Sue:You know, it was during the pandemic, I believe. And there was just not that much going on, right? Yeah, except dance. It was the answer to boredom. No.
Sue:But I mean, the kind of focus on tiny things in the autumn when they were shut in, this was something that was going on in the house. And it was a big deal from that perspective. Definitely. And actually having some kind of pests in the house, a little while ago, I hesitate to admit this, but we got bedbugs. Oh, And that's ants in the kitchen, cockroaches, mice, rats, you know, stuff like that.
Sue:It really weirdly unsettles me. I think it unsettles a lot of people. And I think it has something to do with that sense of chaos, order it versus chaos, and of control of your environment at home. Plus, just makes you feel itchy.
Deborah:Yeah. I'm checking behind your ears. What was that ugly scalp? Itch. Yeah.
Deborah:Yeah. Yeah.
Sue:No. It's it's really unpleasant.
Deborah:I thought you were actually going to say that it was somewhat of a relief to be battling an actual pest, whereas during the pandemic, we had all these unseen flying Yeah. Crabs that we didn't know what to do about. You know what?
Sue:That hadn't occurred to me. I think it's actually quite difficult to We had an episode a while ago about the pandemic, right, Where I have to make quite an effort to remember how afraid I was. Yeah. Because I've kind of suppressed that. Yep.
Sue:And when we really didn't quite know. But you're right, yeah. I mean, it's a much more seen enemy, isn't it? You can actually zap them and you can
Deborah:see Right, them right. Well, for our listeners, you just got an example of Sue's off the cuff punning behavior, which happens quite a lot. She's making a face like you, miss. Idea what you mean. And I hope I'm not being a typical American here subscribing to stereotypes about British people, but it seems to me that you Brits are deservedly famous for your humor.
Deborah:Do you see
Sue:that as true? I don't know. I mean, there's a lot of programs in Britain which are kind of staffed by a rolling cast of people who are very highly educated, witty people. And it kind of maybe sets the tone of the type of humor. A lot of it is wordplay.
Sue:A lot of it's quite sharp, quite clever with references to, I don't know, the classics or whatever. So I think that there is a bit more of a tradition of that, and that is still in living memory amongst middle class, the middle and upper classes. But in terms of You know, wordplay is something that, to some extent, you were brought up with. Yeah. So the fact that my parents did not talk to me in baby language, You know, we had discussions over the dinner table ever since I was tiny.
Sue:And so I have a really good vocabulary. I was quite surprised when I did, I think the GRE or something. And that was the category I scored the best in. And it's like, I was trying to get in to do a science Right. Graduate degree.
Sue:And I was not really expecting that.
Deborah:Right, right. Yeah.
Sue:But I'm just interested in the sound of words and other meanings, and it's a place where that my mind goes. Is that British or not? There's a whole punning festival. And here's the thing that's really embarrassing. I find it quite annoying when other people pun.
Sue:And it's like, yes, but this is me, so But it's of course, I mean, I am genuinely aware of not overdoing it. Because I think of many more puns than I actually share. You will be horrified to know. But no, I mean, it can also be used And this kind of British humor can be used in ways which are quite unkind sometimes. You really, really want to know your audience and be sensitive to how people are feeling about it.
Sue:I've definitely made some mistakes where, you know, if somebody doesn't understand a word, it's just rude. It's just rude. So I'm care I'm much more careful than I used to be. And I did make enemies when I first came to America by misusing this a sort of an ironic type of of sharp British Right. Which being
Deborah:tolerated with with humor, maybe.
Sue:Maybe. Yeah. Yeah.
Deborah:Maybe that's not your interesting, we're more thin skinned. So you mentioned No.
Sue:I don't think so. I think I think it's just a kind of British rudeness. Oh. And I'm just I'm just making effort to be to be more respectful. And do
Deborah:you have any suggestions for people who want to write light verse?
Sue:I think starting with something that's just exasperating you. And so often, exasperation is like kind of funny. Yeah. And if you listen to comedians on the telly, they very often start with, I was on the bus the other day and this woman gets on and she looks dressed to the nines and then she opens her mouth and she says something and you go on and it's like this, where you see something that's a huge contrast, something that annoys you, that's exasperating rather than a kind of earth shattering annoyance where you're genuinely angry.
Deborah:Yeah. And it becomes very relatable, which your poem is.
Sue:It's Right. About I hope so.
Deborah:Had ants. And I, for women, live in one of these little houses that is floating on a concrete slab. I totally get it about the doors closing half of the year and refusing Right. To close it half of the
Sue:floating It's on a slow ocean of clay. And I kinda like I like thinking about that. There was this it was an Irish, modern Irish band that had a line in it that was something like, I was sitting on a raft as the earth rolling through the heavens. The idea of kind of clinging to this floating raft of the earth. And I just kinda love that idea that we're floating on this raft of clay with the seasons expanding and contracting.
Deborah:It's very beautiful. It makes you feel vulnerable, but at the same time, you're in the same boat as Right, probably other living right.
Sue:Yeah. And I think sometimes when you start from a bit of exasperation, quite often it takes you somewhere else. You realize that, you know, in this case with ants, this idea of chaos and order is something that really strongly occurs to me, and I realize that I'm kind of afraid of what's just beneath the surface, and where are the ants coming from, and how many of them are there? And it's kind of like when you have a dentist drilling your teeth, and the idea that just beneath the surface is this ocean of pain. Oh god.
Sue:I just find it horrifying.
Deborah:It is horrifying and painful. Yeah,
Sue:yeah. I mean, it's not an infinite pain, but it's still something that really scares me and it sort of feels a little bit the same when you've got just the tip of the iceberg of all of these insects just under the surface. Yeah.
Deborah:And then you come down in the end to maybe the best we can do in these strange circumstances and is an obsession with the small distracting us from disasters that might really befall. And there again is your subtle rhyme and your reference to these larger concerns maybe answer just, as you say, the tip of the iceberg.
Sue:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's so easy to go off the deep end.
Deborah:Yep. Yep. Well, can I reread it? Sure. Okay.
Deborah:Antfall. Antagonize ants. Not the kind married to your uncles or your father's sister who you never really liked, Lay strange chemicals across their fulminating trails. Try baking powder, grated orange, or lemon peel. Try wiping them up repeatedly with simple soap or some other organic solution, a not so simple solution.
Deborah:Do a fun series of experiments with syrup to see if you can get them to describe a giant heart reminding your husband how glad he is to have married you, goddess that you are. But in the end, fuck it. It's ant sticks and insecticide spray, instant annihilation. Yay. I'm ashamed to not be that ashamed, to admit.
Deborah:Ants well up, up through flooding cracks in the heaving soil. Heaving is a relative term. The clay's slow swell means the doors close in the summer but not in the fall. Rising like seen chaos threatening the surface order of everyday lives, driven by the organism's imperative to seek shelter and food. Natural selections taking place on the counter, in the coffee maker.
Deborah:They've invented the sugar through a tiny gap in the seal of the jar, the kind of drama I so appreciate unfolding in front of my sleep deprived eyes. Maybe the best we can do in these strange circumstances is an obsession with the small, distracting us from disasters that might really be faulty.
Sue:Thank you, Deborah. That was really fun to listen to. Maybe it's not piece of rubbish after all.
Deborah:It's really fun to read.
Sue:And actually, I'm kind of toying with maybe for that prompt based right now that we're going to do. I whether exasperation might be a prompt that we could use. The prompt for today is chaos or beneath my normal notice. Then send it to curiositycatpodcastgmail dot com. Deborah and I will be sure to read it and respond with specific positive comments, or you could bring it with you to the next open mic this coming Sunday, June 21 at The Good Table Gathering Space.
Sue:Come at three if you'd like to get a cup of tea for a 03:30 start.
Deborah:We're always delighted to receive your poems. Besides print versions, voice recordings as dot WAV files are welcome. Let us know if you'd like us to record for you. We may choose your poem to include on an upcoming show. One way or the other, we will respond to your submission.
Deborah:Go to curiositycatpodcasts.com to read our show notes and see the poems and print with the beautiful artwork that Sue chooses to complement them and help us spread the word about Follow A Fish. Our theme music is Emile Pessar's Andalus, played by me, Debra Schmidt on flute, accompanied by Brian Baker on piano. Production and editing are done by Sue Boudreaux in El Sobrante, California. Thanks for joining us.