So Long and Thanks For All the Fish

No I'm not going anywhere. But the Vogons are coming.

I want to say I was in 7th grade when I first read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would have been around 1981-2 I guess. What I know certainly was that one of my friends read it first and passed it along to me, because that’s how I got almost anything new or interesting to read, the exception being John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces which my mother passed along in an extraordinary act of worldliness for her. We were readers in my family, but mostly of Jehovah’s Witness literature, so if you know anything about Douglas Adams’s masterpiece and first entry in his five-book trilogy (six if you count And Another Thing and I’m not the kind of person to fight about that kind of stuff) and his views toward organized religion you know that it’s not the kind of book that would have been allowed in my childhood home, had I made a habit of getting permission about what to read in the first place.

Mostly I got my illicit reading material from the public library. There was a small branch about 6 blocks away from the trailer park, close enough to ride my bike but far enough that I worried about getting caught in an afternoon cloudburst while carrying books back and forth, since I knew if they got ruined I couldn’t afford to pay for the damaged books and my parents would find out that I’d been reading books with worldly attitudes about science, God and sex. That’s where I got my Golden Age of Science Fiction titles from: Heinlein and Asimov mostly, and Harlan Ellison’s anthology Again, Dangerous Visions which included a short story by Kurt Vonnegut titled “The Great Space Fuck.” The title alone would have gotten me a few meetings with the elders. The librarians there never asked if I was old enough to be reading The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever; they just stamped my card and the book and sent me on my way.

But the really new stuff I got from my classmates, mostly from Geoff and Jules, and I didn’t ask where they got their books from. I was just glad to be able to read them.

The thing about Adams for me as an early teen was that he was funny on multiple levels. There was silliness, of course, which I hadn’t outgrown yet, but there was biting wit and even wordplay. Like in this exchange between Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent when they’re about to jump into hyperspace.

It's unpleasantly like being drunk."

"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"

"You ask a glass of water."

I hadn’t read anyone like that before and was just taken by it.

I’ve been thinking about Adams this week because of the orcas.

Now if you do a boring internet search (like for FACTS), you’ll get a bunch of articles about how dolphins and orcas are related as well as some stories from 2019 and others from 2021 about this same thing happening but honestly in 2021 most of us were worried about other stuff and who even believes 2019 happened at this point.

No, this time it’s different. This time it’s a sign that Douglas Adams was a time-traveler who told us how the end of Earth was going to happen and that we needed to already be in Alpha Centauri objecting to the plans for the interstellar bypass instead of piddling around with billionaires launching themselves to the edge of space and refusing to stay there. There’s about to be Vogons in the sky, and they’ll have some poems to read to us before they blast the planet to bits

(I “dressed up” as Arthur Dent to take my kids trick-or-treating a couple of years ago. Nobody got it.)

The Vogon poetry section of Hitchhiker’s is, to this day, one of my favorite moments in the book. I love it.

The chapter begins by noting that Vogon poetry is only the third-worst poetry in the universe, and claims the worst was written by Paula Nancy Millstone Jennings of Greenbridge, Essex, England. (Apparently this was an actual person in the radio show, a schoolmate of Adams who he shared a prize in English with. Adams changed the name in the book after his friend complained, not about being called the worst poet in the universe, but because Adams put his actual address in the original broadcast.)

The poet in this scene is Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz, the commander of the construction fleet that has just destroyed Earth.

Prostetnic Vogon Jeltz smiled very slowly. This was done not to much for effect as because he was trying to remember the sequence of muscle movements. He had had a terribly therapeutic yell at his prisoners and was now feeling quite relaxed and ready for a little callousness.

The prisoners sat in Poetry Appreciation Chairs—strapped in. Vogons held no illusions as to the regard their works were generally held in. Their early attempts at composition had been part of bludgeoning insistence that they be accepted as a properly evolved and cultured race, but the only thing that kept them going was sheer bloodymindedness.

The sweat stood out cold on Ford Prefect’s brow, and slid round the electrodes strapped to his temples. These were attached to a battery of electronic equipment—imagery intensifiers, rhythmic modulators, alliterative residulators and simile dumpers—all designed to heighten the experience of the poem and make sure that not a single nuance of the poet’s thought was lost.

I’m not going to suggest that my long ago high school class experience of poetry was quite like this, but there’s a reason why Adams’s description of this moment resonates beyond the uncomfortable desks in the hot classrooms I sat in. I seem to remember class discussion of poems mostly swinging wildly between either dissecting a poem as though the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything were hidden in the lines or “it means what you think it means.” Neither of those approaches are very helpful when it comes to aiding young people to explore artistic (as opposed to informative) writing.

But as someone who’s taught poetry in college classrooms, I can also see how easy it is to slip into those modes of instruction. Okay, to slip into the first one. I’ve never been a “it means what you think it means” person except to say that our individual life experiences inform what we take from poems, so a line that might not do much for me is incredibly intense to you, and vice-versa. I’ve seen some of my students’ faces twist up when I’ve gone off on a tangent about the etymology of a word or the importance of a historical moment or point out the number of times a hard-G sound appears in the space of 4 lines, while others in the class got wide-eyed at the same stuff.

People are wired differently. Some readers like Rupi Kaur and some like Kenny Goldsmith and some hate both of them. And still others just hate the way that poetry gets talked about sometimes, and that’s what Adams was also sending up in this section of the novel.

“Now Earthlings…” whirred the Vogon…”I present you with a simple choice! Either die in the vacuum of space, or…” he paused for melodramatic effect, “tell me how good you thought my poem was!”

He threw himself backwards into a huge leathery bat-shaped seat and watched them. He did the smile again.

Ford was rasping for breath. He rolled his dusty tongue round his parched mouth and moaned.

Arthur said brightly: “Actually I quite liked it.”…..”I thought that some of the metaphysical imagery was particularly effective.”

…..

“Yes, do continue…”invited the Vogon.

“Oh…and er…interesting rhythmic devices too,” continued Arthur, “which seemed to counterpoint the…er…er” He floundered.

Ford leaped to his rescue, hazarding “counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the…er…” He floundered too, but Arthur was ready again.

“humanity of the…”

“Vogonity,” Ford hissed at him.

“Ah yes, Vogonity (sorry) of the poet’s compassionate soul…which contrives through the medium of the verse structure to sublimate this, transcend that, and come to terms with the fundamental dichotomies of the other”

It goes on a little longer but I think the point’s been made. Adams is sending up an overly academic way of talking about art, whether it’s poetry or painting or a theater production. And maybe Adams is being a little harsh here, but I think most people who spend time in or around academia have had moments where it feels like someone is writing (or talking) in a way that seems more aimed at proving how large a vocabulary they have rather than actually communicating with other people about the art in front of them.

I’m getting perilously close to doing a DIscourse here and I don’t want that, so instead I want to have a little fun and generate some Vogon Poetry of my own. Way back when I got my first iPhone, I found an app which generated Vogon Poetry. It didn’t last for very long in the store because the Adams estate sent the makers a cease and desist order which, fair. It’s still available online, I discovered, at Wonderful Poetry Machine. You choose both styles (Amorous, Angry, Efficient, Epic, Hungry, Piratical, Provincial and Sporty) and length (Short, Medium, Long and Epic) and it generates a poem for you. Here for your amusement(?) is a long piratical Vogon poem.

I also asked ChatGPT to generate a short, piratical Vogon poem.

So look, I’m not going to try to bullshit you into saying that either one of these poems is good. I don’t usually do the good-bad dichotomy with poems to begin with. The reason this newsletter is called “Another Poem to Love” instead of something like “Great Poems You Should Read” is that I figured out a long time ago that there are a lot of poems out there that just aren’t for me, and that doesn’t make them bad. It just makes them not for me. Like I said earlier, people are wired differently.

But when it comes to the question of which poem is more interesting, I think the one done by the Vogon Poetry Generator wins easily. I mean at least it’s weird, and the closing line, “Corrupt, corrupt brilliance? That’s what a slug’s life is about? Really.” is jarring and funny. And if you’re high, it’s probably hilarious. Somebody do that and report back, would you?

Whereas the ChatGPT one is predictable. The most fun line in there is “When Vogons come, plug up your holes” but only if you read it with a dirty mind. Which you should. That’s my definitive poetry statement here. If you can read lines of a poem with a dirty mind, you should. Discourse!

Thanks for reading. If you like what I’m doing here, I’d appreciate it if you’d share these posts with others you think might like them, either on Notes or whatever other social places you frequent.