A Boy Named Bibb
My first kind of sort of published poem
Alakazam!
The text, if you have trouble reading it from the image above.
I know what you’re thinking: “Chris done lost his !@$# mind.” But I assure you, I have not lost my !@#$ mind. I had a perfectly good and valid reason for writing the above poem. And notice what section we’re in: published works. What twisted kind of freaky publication would publish that horrifying drivel?
Glad you asked!
It all started in a lovely church chapel on the UAB campus. Feast your peepers on this stained glass.
What a great place in which to commit random acts of literature!
But it wasn’t altogether random. This was on the third day of the annual convention of the Alabama Writers’ Cooperative in September, 2023. By Sunday, we had been through over two days of non-stop lectures and workshops. The first presentation that day was by horror author Lee Rozelle, seen here preparing to horrify us.
On that sunny Sunday morn, in that occasionally holy place, Lee read us excerpts from his work-in-progress that featured a so-called Boy in a Blue Blazer, or “Bibb”. Bibb was a misshapen lad who was raised on the grounds of a boarding school. He had many grotesque deformities which I won’t go into, though some are featured in my poem so I guess I already spilled the “multi-genitalia” beans.
Lee, you see, is really into the body horror sub-genre. You can scarcely read a page without encountering extraneous (or missing) limbs/protuberances, bodily fluids by the gallon, and cruel torture. Lee reads his work aloud with great gusto and an above-average number of giggle-breaks, in my limited experience of author readings. When reading Bibb’s lines, he adopts a high, screechy, twangy voice like that of The Captain character in the movie “Cool Hand Luke,” but with more of a cleft palate effect.
But Lee had a problem: a failure of imagination. Hard to believe, given the countless revolting details he came up with for his book, but he couldn’t come up with a completely satisfying last name for the lad named “Bibb.” Bibb would do for most references, but he did want the kid to have an actual last name. So he threw it out to the attendees as a challenge: everyone give him suggested names, then we would vote, and the winning name would go into his soon-to-be-published book.
This is my blog about my writing, so you can guess who won the ol’ Name That Bibb contesterino: me.
There were several solid contenders, mostly monosyllabic references to private parts or, bibb lettuce or Bibb County or, for reasons that escape me, butter beans. But only mine took into account the heartrending juxtaposition of the boy always dressed in a blue blazer (hence the first name) living on the grounds of a tony private academy, but isolated and reviled for his grotesque appearance. So I gave him a name appropriate to the scion of a great family, and Bibb Smythe-Hepperington III (“Trey”) was that day christened.
Months later, when Lee’s book approached publication, he shared this heartfelt (though brief) tribute:
And that would be the whole story, except for the glaring fact of the existence of my poem shown at the top of this blog post. Was I driven mad by my scant involvement in Lee’s work? Was I capering about for attention and further acclaim? Yes and no; I’m always capering etc., but I was not driven mad. Not at all.
I wrote that ugly poem at the behest of the Poet Laureate of Alabama, Ashley M. Jones.
Now, Ashley didn’t come right out and say, “Hey, write me a poem about a hideously deformed kid with loads of extra pee-pees.” Not in so many words, anyway.
What happened was the thing I noticed throughout the conference: we had so many workshops, one right after the other, on wildly diverse topics (but all involving writing), that the boundaries between them became blurred. At least that’s what happened in my mind, for I would become caught up in an idea during one 50-minute workshop, and then there would be a writing exercise, and then the leader would call “time” and I would be forced to reluctantly drop what I was doing and get ready to pay full attention to the presenter of the next topic. Sometimes I was ready to move on, sometimes I was not; how I wished I could follow a flash of inspiration through to its natural conclusion!
On Friday and Saturday, I maintained workshop discipline. But by Sunday, I was primed and ready to finish something—I knew not what.
Lee only did a reading and conducted the name-that-freak contest; he did not have us do a writing exercise. Which was a shame, because his reading and the thinking of a name had fired me up to write some body horror. But…time’s up! Everybody sit up and pay attention to the Poet Laureate of Alabama, Ashley M. Jones!
Which I did. And Ashley gave perhaps the most learned, erudite lecture of the whole weekend, quickly giving us an introduction to the acrostic style of poetry. In an acrostic, the first letters of each line of poetry combine to spell out a message separate from (but related to) the content of the poem itself. So for a simple example if you wanted to write an acrostic about your favorite garden hose it might go like this:
When I was a child, I drank As a child; Then I grew up, Expanding my horizons but always Relishing cool sips from Hosea, my favorite garden hose.
Damn, that’s actually good! But Ashley’s examples were exponentially more literary and emotional than that. Her examples from other authors were about the endless quest for love and peace and fairness, with a heavy dose of social justice. Inspiration was growing to a crescendo, for we all knew that this lecture would end with a writing exercise and so we would be allowed to express our innermost longings, acrostic-style.
I tried—I really tried—to get all overwrought about some real, emotional topic. But I found myself writing my title: “A Boy Named Bibb,” across the top of my page. It’s the blurred boundaries thing, and the frustration from not having fully worked out anything in writing all weekend.
It’s ironic but not surprising at all that, while engaged in three days of non-stop writing, I had not finished even a short work. It’s not surprising because I always write in complete solitude with my office door shut and with noise-cancelling headphones over my ears. I need to shut out all external stimuli. Writing in public, elbow-to-elbow with other writers, doesn’t let me enter my flow state.
But that day, during Lee’s reading and after the naming exercise, I had a fully-worked-out idea for a little backgrounder about Bibb, in prose form. But, since we didn’t get to write in that workshop, the idea was running in circles in my head the whole time Ashley M. Jones (Poet Laureate of Alabama) was telling us how to turn our innermost feelings into acrostic poems.
I decided to damn the torpedoes and just write that Bibb backgrounder as an acrostic, even if it was not in a body-horror workshop. I was going to just keep it to myself, but when it was halfway finished, my mom asked to see what I was writing. She probably expected to see some lame-ass attempt at loving/longing/peace-mongering. Well, when she saw what I was actually writing, she laughed quite hard.
I was thus inspired to share it with the class when Ashley M. Jones (PLofA) asked for volunteers to read their work. My poem was rather jarring, delivered as it was amidst all the genuinely beautiful works that others had written, but it got a gratifying response (honestly, anything from vomiting to laughter would have been gratifying, given the genre I chose).
So, that’s how that happened.
By the way, you may notice that if you follow the acrostic decryption exactly, “Bibb” is misspelled as “Bib.” But this is the hand-written version, which I later autographed and gifted to Lee Rozelle as the first Bibb fanfic, so I can’t show you a corrected copy. The obvious fix is to make the first four lines read like so:
Born with countless extra genitals, the Infant was impossible to diaper. Blue Blazers hid his shame in later years.
Problem solved.
Yes, it’s certainly awkward to have a one-word line (“Blue”) but you know what? A man’s very first acrostic is almost bound to be awkward, and to focus more on achieving the gimmicky “spell a word with the first letters” effect than on gripping content.
Boing!
I feel like the standalone Blue is more poetic anyway.