NaPoWriMo Day 18: CAMP!

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Table of Contents

• Freewrite

• Poem: “my hair stays on your pillow like a questio …

• Prompt

Freewrite

With this freewrite, as well as all freewrites, do not put any pressure on yourself to be good. You are simply getting thoughts on the page. You can write in poetry or in prose, but feel free to write poorly, sloppily, redundantly, and with cliches. Now is the time for ideas—we will eventually sculpt those ideas into art.

Freewrite for 8-10 minutes. Think of an extremely ordinary moment that happened to you recently. Inanely ordinary. You took a shower. You bought groceries. Someone told you you dropped your wallet. That kind of thing. 

Write about it in an extremely dramatic way. Be hyperbolic, excessive, ludicrous. 

For example, don’t tell me you got groceries. Zoom in. The zucchini WATCHED YOU buy the cucumbers. The salmon was already rotting in your basket. The cashier didn’t wish you a good day and then you had a bad day. 

Don’t worry about “good writing.” Just have fun. 

Poem: “my hair stays on your pillow like a question mark” by Melissa-Lozada Oliva

You can listen to Melissa read this poem here.

skinny white girl with a sugar skull tattoo says:

     no offense melissa??

    but i know when you’ve been around ??

    because your hair gets all over everything??

    & no offense but it kind of grosses me out??

    if you come into my apartment can you just please be aware of that??

imagine being as gross as u fear??

imagine the things that shed from you turning into something that survives the apocalypse??

the scientists trapping it in a plastic container ?? putting a bunch of nuclear science waves on it?? it surviving but coming out with two more heads?? or I don’t know, is that how it works??

imagine your hairs as daddy long legs crawling up the shower curtain??

​

     daddy’s long legs??daddy’s dark legs??daddy’s hairy dark legs??

imagine you are what makes the white girls in a brooklyn apartment scream??

except deep down??you want to be a white girl in a brooklyn apartment??screaming??following her dreams??

there is not a white part inside of you or maybe there is??

   if so what do you do with it??

   do you spray it with windex??

   trap it under a paper cup??

   ​find the right shoe??

   find the right man??

   & then what does he do???

    with the body??

This poem teeters between inanity and brilliance, which I think a lot of good poetry tends to do. I love all of its quirks: the play with page-space, the double and triple punctuation marks, the fact that I can hear the voice of this poem and, somehow, it’s the exact same voice of the performance. That takes a lot of skill to pull off.

This is a poem whose genius is generated from its overwroughtness. Everything is treated with a sense of hyperbole, from a mundane conversation to the very real questions about self-worth and aspiring towards whiteness. It’s all imbued with a sense of absurdity, and rightfully so, since it’s absurd to live in a world where these questions are asked in earnest.

I like to think of this poem as being “campy.” Camp is one of those things that’s hard to describe: if you know, you know, but putting it into language is tricky, and employing it in art is even trickier, since you can quickly go from being campy to being gaudy and ineffective. In this poem, a few things strike me as being utterly camp:

• The overwroughtness of the poem’s voice and language. “Something that survives the apocalypse??” Please! I can’t explain why this line, bordering on cliché, works for the poem, but it does.

• The intentional inane play with language. “Daddy’s dark hairy legs??” It’s so silly, but it also amplifies something real about race and gender.

• The discovery within the language play. I can tell that this poem stumbled into its brilliance simply by being playful, and by being:

• Willing to be ugly, to perform what usually is not performed.

These are elements of camp, an idea that Susan Sontag wrote extensively about in her Notes on “Camp”. The emphasis, here, is on being playful, obscene, and larger-than-life, and seeing what comes out of it. Whatever resonates for you in Lozada-Oliva’s poem, it resonates because it amplifies something ridiculous and makes you see it in a new light.

Here are some quotes from Sontag on what camp is:

• "Camp taste turns its back on the good-bad axis of ordinary aesthetic judgement. Camp doesn't reverse things. It doesn't argue that the good is bad, or the bad is good. What it does is to offer for art and for life a different —or supplementary —set of standards."

• "The connoisseur of Camp [finds pleasure] in the coarsest, commonest pleasures, in the arts of the masses."

• "Camp is the spirit of extravagance."

• "Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers."

• "Camp is being-as-playing-a-role."

• "Camp is outrageous aestheticism."

• "Camp sees everything in quotation marks."

• Indeed the essence of Camp is its love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration.'"

Prompt

Write a campy poem.

If you’re unsure what to make of that prompt, write a poem that is intentionally, ridiculously exaggerated, and use that exaggeration to discover something about your poem’s subject matter. I had your freewrite focus on the everyday and mundane, because I think that’s often a source of surprise and discovery. If that doesn’t work for you, choose a topic you don’t understand, “amplify” it (in whatever way that word makes sense to you), and just see what happens. This is an abstract prompt, but I trust you’ll make something great.