I was first introduced to Lewis Carrollâs âMad Gardenerâs Songâ in a class taught by Rick Kenney in the fall of 1998. (Most good things in my life have arrived via Rick.) I wrote a few riffs on the original (âHe thought he saw a Leprechaun / Arranging cups for tea: / He looked again, and found it was / The Spanish Cavalryâ) and then mostly forgot about it for a decade. Then, in Brooklyn, in late 2008 and early 2009, I found myself returning to the formâand returning and returning and returning. If you fold a standard sheet of paper twice, you wind up with four rectangles on each side: perfect for writing eight Gardenerâs stanzas. So thatâs what I did, in subway cars and coffee shopsâand soon I had around fifty that I liked, from which the selection here was chosen. I read some of them at a birthday celebration for Lewis Carroll at the Hugo House in late January of 2009, and I read even more of them at the Seattle Central Library that same week. I remember Jason Whitmarsh wondering how many stanzas I might be able to read aloud before the audience rose en masse and tried to kill me. We decided the answer was probably around fifteen.
Now itâs seven years later, and Iâm writing a new Gardenerâs stanza nearly every day. Iâve been tackling Trump and Clinton, guns and povertyâlooking twice at the world, as the form demands. The last of Carrollâs nine stanzas ends with the extinguishment of hope. But the form itself gives me hope (or, as Carroll punctuates it, âhope!â), with its addictive music, its endless capacity for surprise.
A Mad Gardenerâs Half Dozen
He thought he saw a Hula-Hoop
As big as twenty suns:
He looked again, and found it was
An octopus, with guns.
âI mean no harm, my well-armed friend,â
He saidâthat Prince of Puns.
He thought he saw a Telescope
That held the Evening Sky:
He looked again, and found it was
A Dear John Letter (sigh).
âMy name is Jim; itâs not for me!â
He saidâa Valiant Try.
He thought he saw a Garbage Truck
Upended in a ditch:
He looked again, and found it was
A naked, taunting Witch.
âMy manhood sheâs misprized,â he said;
âIt lifts without a hitch!â
He thought he saw a Cup of Milk
All Curdled in the Heat:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bluesmanâs Outsized Feet.
âI like to kick it some myself,â
He saidâjust off the beat.
He thought he saw a Prison Guard
Who wore Chantilly Lace:
He looked again, and found it was
A Booty Call, from Grace.
âIâm tied up till the 3rd,â he said,
âBut text me, just in case.â
He thought he saw a Poltergeist
That cut a movie queue:
He looked again, and found it was
The End of Me and You.
âPerhaps youâll meet again,â he said,
âIn jail, or Kathmandu.â
He thought he saw a Suicide
Beneath the Shaded Elm:
He looked again, and found it was
A Captain at his Helm.
âThe whitecaps on the rocks,â he saidâ
âThey tend to overwhelm.â
—
Cody Walker‘s second poetry collection, The Self-Styled No-Child, is out now from Waywiser. He is the author of Shuffle and Breakdown (Waywiser, 2008) and the coeditor of Alive at the Center: Contemporary Poems from the Pacific Northwest (Ooligan, 2013). His poems have appeared in The Yale Review, Parnassus, Slate, and Salon; his essays have appeared online in The New Yorker and The Kenyon Review. He lives with his family in Ann Arbor and teaches at the University of Michigan.
Find more from Cody in the Winter & Spring 2016 issue of Poetry Northwest.