A Simple Smirk: Not So Simple Human Nature

One quiet spring morning in 1972 a twenty-something reporter for the local newspaper came in the door of my used bookshop in Gardner, Mass., complaining that she couldn't find a subject to write about; did I have any ideas?

After talking a while, we went out on the sidewalk facing Gardner's town square in a large open intersection of five streets. We could see people here and there, coming in and out of stores, some shopping, some going to work, some cleaning sidewalks in front of their stores, all in the center of a town of some 20,000 dating back to pre-colonial times and named for the Col. Thomas Gardner mortally wounded at the Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775. Yet a bright young newspaper reporter with a journalism degree 200 years later still could not find a single thing to write a story about?!

It occurred to me to suggest that every one of those people, and every business, and every event and activity occurring in that town during that day, that week, that month, might make a wonderful front-page story for the Garder News, requiring only a reporter curious enough about any one of those wonderful human subjects to dig the story out, then write it.

The same principle applies to people who come to a Writers Workshop wanting to write poetry, stories, or essays, but don't know what to write about. To the rescue we have human behavior and human nature, and the wonderful natural powers of unique observation and expression that each person enjoys.

Human nature provides every would-be writer with a thousand, no a million, subjects for writing. The list is endless, limited only by one's capacity to see what's out there, to observe with curiosity and/or passion, and try, at least, to understand.

This little poem I wrote today (Friday, July 15, 2011) dramatizes one aspect of human nature, the desire we seldom admit to somehow see ourselves as better than others. It points to one easily overlooked way we use certain words as tiny signals to this otherwise best-hidden desire for superiority. Why best-hidden? Because other people don't like to see it in us, especially when they feel they must hide the same desire they feel relative to us. None of us present, of course, would ever behave or think like that, right?!

The "smirk" idea for a poem emerged when I noticed someone in Hub comments using the word "smirk" rather often, and I thought to myself, "Over-using a pejorative word like 'smirk' puts a not-so-nice part of one's private self on public display."

With the words "smirk," "quirk," and "work" roiling my mind, I began to write. I started with the idea that "Her smirk is not a quirk if it's the essence of her work." Each new line dissected this one person's folly, but that soon seemed unfair, because so many others share the same attitude when they encounter the patently criticizable. So I generalized the "her" and "she" to "some."

Toward the end, however, reading the poem out loud to my wife, it still sounded too much like a wise guy up on Mt. Olympus pointing his finger at all the chumps below. To universalize it, I changed the few words necessary to admit myself the culprit, which gave the poem a surprising new sense of humor and thus more compassion for universal human weakness (if that's what it is).

Noticing one person's foible had led me straight to human nature, and straight back to myself as one small stroke in the larger picture of humanity. I hope you enjoy the poem.

A Simple Smirk

For me a simple smirk is not a quirk
but constitutes the essence of my work.
The other guy can always be the jerk;
superiority assumes that perk.
Why leave it to incompetent guesswork?
Annoyance need not in the darkness lurk
when everyone deserves my sidelong irk,
a happy duty I must never shirk.

Writers Workshop. Does this kind of discussion of the writing process have any value here?

_______________________________________________________
Copyright (c) July 2011 by Max J. Havlick, Writers Workshop, The Max Havlick School of Personal Creation and World Citizenship, a project of New World Community Enterprises, Inc., 16 W. Vermont St., Villa Park, IL 60181-1938 (30 minutes from O'Hare Airport), all rights reserved. Permission here granted to make exact copies that include both the poem and introduction with this copyright notice.