You could make a decent argument that the most experimental poetry coming out of Iowa for the past 15 years had nothing to do with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and everything to do with Chuck Grassley’s thumbs. His Twitter/X account is nearing 15,000 tweets. His signature, unorthodox approach to punctuation, abbreviation and spelling makes clear that the vast majority of these tweets are authored by Grassley personally.
To put it simply, the man lives to post. The personal touch has become more evident over time, as a canon of standard Grassley tweet topics has emerged. No one has chronicled more passionately than Grassley the sad decline of the History Channel — once an oasis of semireliable information about Adolf Hitler, and occasionally other people as well — into a basic-cable swampland of flying saucers, folkloric monsters, and portly pawnsters.
Dairy Queen has been another recurring subject, which Grassley treats with a “warmer” tone, riskily for the ice cream, than that of his History Channel commentary. (“Tune in before they go to Swamp Man.”) In perhaps his best micropoem, now over a decade old, Grassley pays enigmatic tribute to one Iowa franchise location in particular: “Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is a good place for u kno what.”
Three syllables shorter than a 5-7-5 haiku, this is a masterpiece of concision, even by the 140-character standard of Twitter circa 2014. The sheer economy of the tweet draws attention to its internal contradiction. If we already know what the Windsor Heights Dairy Queen is a good place for, why does Grassley need to tell us? The poem asserts its own superfluity. The conviction that a statement is superfluous — but nevertheless must be said — is the paradox at the heart of much great poetry.
While many Little Village readers may share my profound disavowal of the politics Grassley stands for, it wins us no credibility to deny that Grassley has a knack for the craft. He has a real flair for grammatically loose constructions that seem to make up their own rules in real time. The results are often bizarre and instantly memorable. Consider the pigeon (“pidgin”) tweet:
If u lost ur pet pidgin /it’s dead in front yard my Iowa farm JUST DISCOVERED here r identifiers Right leg Blue 2020/3089/AU2020/SHE ///LEFT LEG GREEN BAND NO PRINTED INFO. Sorry for bad news
This has the start-stop, quiet-loud, herky-jerky quality of an E.E. Cummings poem (like this one). The first outburst into all-caps possesses the brash bombast of a newspaper headline, intruding upon the pastoral peace and quiet invoked by the kitschy cliché of “my Iowa farm.”
As with “Windsor Heights Dairy Queen,” the pigeon poem is artistically self-aware: a communique about a dead “pigeon” is rendered in Grassley’s “pidgin” English, a hybrid meeting of an old man’s mind with an informal digital platform. The impersonality of the poem’s collapse into a string of numbers and demographic attributes like gender (“SHE”) is contrasted by the closing note of straightforward condolence (“Sorry for bad news”).
There’s something about dead animals that brings out the best in Grassley’s poetry. One of his earliest viral tweets, and the most famous to this day, brings further carnage:
Fred and I hit a deer on hiway 136 south of Dyersville. After I pulled fender rubbing on tire we continued to farm. Assume deer dead
There is actually another good poem about a deer getting hit by a car, written by an author with Iowa ties. That would be “Traveling Through the Dark” by William E. Stafford, who did his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. But for all the vivid detail and humanity of Stafford’s poem, Grassley’s seems to me the more complex.
“Assume deer dead”: the absence of concluding punctuation suspends the poem in the uncertainty of the deer’s fate. Grassley’s telegraphic preference for the omission of grammatical articles (a/an/the) creates fruitful ambiguities. “[W]e continued to farm”: presumably this means that Fred and the speaker continued driving to the farm (with “farm” serving as a noun). Yet without the article, “farm” also scans as a verb: Fred and the speaker continued to engage in the act of farming. Is the deer’s death thus implied to be a part of the general harvest?
The greatest achievement of “Assume deer dead” is the rapid establishment of a complex psychology. The one time the poem uses an article is to introduce the deer (“Fred and I hit a deer”). For a lesser user of the English language, it would be standard to use the definite article when referring to the deer again: “I assume the deer is dead.”
But the speaker of the poem does not do this. Rather than use the definite article — which would establish the deer as a particular, unique individual — the speaker chooses to drop the article entirely. The speaker would rather break the rules of grammar than acknowledge the deer he just ran over as an individual creature, with individual sufferings.
In short, the speaker of the poem is revealed, in no time at all, to be a heartless bastard. Only a true poet like Senator Grassley could convey this impression so swiftly and definitively.
