Gloucester Daily Times | Monday, Feb. 28, 2022
Entering the third year of plague, we continue to fight boredom – an enemy as threatening as the virus. One comfort is knowing we are in this together. We all sometimes get boredom, covid-caused or otherwise. In “Dream Song 14” the wonderful poet John Berryman had this to say about boredom:
Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
We ourselves flash and yearn,
And moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no
Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored….
Sorry to say, poetry itself can bore, bad poetry that is. Lawrence Ferlinghetti once wrote, “We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.”
But poetry does cancel boredom, good poetry that is. The Berryman poem on boredom often relieves mine. It makes me smile, makes me feel less isolated. Words work. They change reality. Advertisers know this. Drugs on TV ads are always “fast acting” and make you smile. They seem to affect friends, too, who will suddenly want to talk to you, might even find you interesting. And the names are positively (even poetically) suggestive: Claritin, Allegra, Tums, Celebrex… The companies who advertise know this and name themselves just as cleverly: CVS Health, Home Depot, Best Buy, Dollar General… It works. People flock to them. I recently read of a housewife who broke down in tears when she learned her husband had driven to Target without her.
News outlets know this, too. Strident, hollow, and oppositional newscasts have given us (guess what?) a country full of strident, hollow, oppositional people. Words are powerful; the emotion they create might be anger or disgust, but at least it isn’t boredom. This morning I had an insight into the news angle. I said, in a boring way, “I’m bored with cereal.” Then, inspiration! I realized what I had actually done was break my silence, lash out, finally reveal…that I was bored with cereal. Heart sped. Boredom bolted. My wife, Sandy, then expressed outrage, fired back: “Good. Because we’re all out.”
Since the covid crisis is not likely to change in the near term we have to look at the same old same old in a new light, with a new vocabulary. Because being bored is boring. I’ve done away with it. My life is now sensational. I can backlash with the best of them. I wake up ready to unleash, ready to put people on notice, call them out. This greatly softens the lackluster task of living through plague. At times, the new mood is even happy. This morning, I went to the store and bought a box of Cheerios.
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Sidebar: The annual Poetry without Paper contest, sponsored by the Lyceum Committee of the Sawyer Free Library, will have its 20th run from March 1 to April 30, 2022. All students attending school, or living in, Gloucester are eligible in three categories: elementary, middle school, and high school. Prizes galore. Visit the Sawyer Free Library website for details: https://sawyerfreelibrary.org.