Aaron Belz’s humorous verse tethers readers to reality

by Mr. Sheehy

Aaron Belz is a funny poet. Consistently funny, not “he slipped a giggle-inducing verse into a broader collection” funny (ala Billy Collins) but funny in a way that his readers have come to expect. Funny as a primary vehicle for communicating what he has to say.

Yet he defies any attempt to banish him to the poetic land of Light Verse, a land from which no amount of verbal wit can break Ogden Nash free. True to form, in his latest collection, Glitter Bomb, Belz stares solemnly into our collective mirror and uses humor to explain what he sees. That humor is witty and full of word play, but Belz’s insightful observations betray his contemplative mind.

Of course with any humorist the first thing readers do is laugh, and Belz utilizes a variety of methods to make us grin. A classic technique he uses differently almost every time is the unexpected twist. See his redirecting of cliches, like in “Ice Cream”:

I scream, you scream, we all scream
when we get stabbed in the heart.

or his inversion of words’ normal pairings, like in “Interesting About You,” when what’s interesting is the ways “you fail to distinguish yourself.” Other times he plays upon our accustomed expectations, like in “Palindromes,” when the second half of each palindrome is not a sensible line but a strange garble of phonetic nonsense akin to the Swedish Chef’s monologues.

Belz’s word play draws particularly skillfully from contemporary idiom and colloquialisms, sometimes teasing the idiom, other times celebrating it. Using expressions anachronistically sounds silly and highlights how dependent upon cultural context our language is, as in a stanza of “Trois Poesies Antiques” called “Wack Kings”:

Watch out for the wack kings,
clanking their armor,
riding their dope horsies over the hill.

or in “Hambone,” where the poet thinks of his relationship “in a completely old way”:

“What has gotten into thee?”
you asked. “I’m boogying!”
said I. “Why don’t thou gettest

thy groove on, too?”

Other times Belz toys with the raw frequency of our idiomatic expressions, like in “No Vacancy,” where he strings together a series of disconnected nothings to make a conversation of sorts:

“Actually,” they say.
“Let’s be honest,” they begin.

“On the flip side,” I respond.
“As fate would have it,” you admit–

you confess. “It wasn’t your
fault,” you continue . . .

or in “So this is Thursday,” where he begins fourteen separate lines with “So this is . . . “

As readers laugh through a first perusal of Glitter Bomb, a few dark clouds form. At least, that’s the common imagery of the humorist-with-a-purpose. If a writer is notably intelligent or satirical we must say they have a dark sense of humor, a label applied since Twain and Bierce. A better image here might be to say that while Belz’s wit supplies buoyancy to our spirits, we notice after a time he has us tethered to something solid: reality.

This humorist has found some of the funniest parts of our lives are the parts we do not share or discuss with others. One such aspect is the ongoing battle we wage with what feels like our various selves. In a number of poems, like “Your Objective,” and “Song of Myself,” Belz splits these selves apart and toys with our denials of conflict and vice and our efforts and failures at virtue.

In “1-0,” for example, the speaker declares,

I’ve taken a vote among
myself and it’s unanimous
we’d like me to be slightly
less of a jerk if possible”

but by the end of the poem he concedes it might not happen. The verse operates subtly, teasing our lack of conviction in our demands of ourselves (“slightly” and “if possible”) and giggling at the oddity of a phrase like “among myself” even as it admits that 1) he’s a jerk and 2) he won’t be changing.

Such humor touches a reader close to the heart, and I get the sense that Belz is not only mocking others, but himself. How else could he discover the poignancy present in “Team”?

There’s no “I” in team,
but there’s one in bitterness
and one in failure.

Happily for Belz, his privacy is intact and I have no clue what might have inspired such verses. I do have a clue, however, about what parts of me connect so well to what Belz mocks, and I constantly laugh and pause, knowing I too may be the butt of the joke. As a sample, there is a part of me that, despite my best efforts to resist it, has succumbed to the promises of advertising. This version of me has begun to see myself in overblown, over-confident terms, like the speaker in “My Chosen Vocation,” who, though failing at his goals in life, is left “rather sexy-looking” with his messy hair that was “volumized / with Matrix Essentials / Foam Volumizer”; in his own mind, he is the picture of a modern day Walt Whitman, not a washed up, purposeless bum. I’d like to say I’m not that bad, but who am I fooling? Perhaps Belz is right.

E.B. White wrote of Mark Twain that he didn’t know that a humorist must always preach, as Twain claimed in one instance they should, but that they must always speak the truth. In this collection of poems Aaron Belz rebuffs for his poetry the label light verse and earns a better label, humorous verse, because he has tethered his playful wit to the noble satirical goal of speaking the truth.

He has succeeded, and readers of this volume can be confident their reading will begin in laughter and end in wisdom.