Paul Genega: Pick of the Week [ed. Terence Winch]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Clip / Caste

 

It’s the Friday before a holiday so the barber shop

is wild with boys, all from my school, none a friend.

 

Glum in the back, I wait to be summoned to one of four

barbers. Jimmy the owner up front is the one you want

 

and the cool boys from the nice blocks swarm

his chair, jostling each other, laughing big laughs

 

until they are called to the clippers, while I—

predictably—get Pete, short guy with the fourth chair

 

who quickly snips, buzzes, rubs in green goo, combs.

I hand him the coin father gave me for the tip.

 

He says nothing. Nor do I. Outside in the gathering

dusk, Jimmy’s boys are waiting for their pals.

 

Our haircuts, I see, all look perfectly the same.

But theirs are better.

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Paul Genega is the author of Outtakes: New and Selected Poems 1975-2023 (Salmon Poetry, 2023) and six previous collections. His poetry received the “Discovery”/The Nation Prize, the Lucille Medwick Award from The New York Quarterly, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, among other honors. He is Professor Emeritus at Bloomfield College, New Jersey, where he founded the creative writing program, taught literature and writing, and served as chair of Humanities. ________________________________________________________________________________________________________

                                                                 Bruce Davidson, Brooklyn Gang, Brooklyn, NY, 1959

Comments

[Thomas O'Grady]

This is a keeper, for sure. And sonnet-esque, no less . . . It truly captures the angst of the moment described as well as the lingering implications. Nicely done!

[Elinor Nauen]

As good a poem about childhood/ young adolescence as I’ve ever read. Yep, a keeper.

[lally]

nailed it

[Grace Cavalieri]

Bittersweet truth. We each have a feature that did not stand up to others. How wonderful to make it universal in poetry.

[Patricia Lee Stotter]

This poem has woken up parts of my life, my feeling history,that have been asleep
for eons.

Spot on. Absolutely wonderful.

[Eileen Reich]

Clip/Caste brings memories to the surface. The title is perfect. I loved this poem and the artwork.

[Richard Giannone]

Reminds me of the barber shop I went to as kid. It was a bookie. They never charged young boys, who served as a front for the illegal betting. That's a way to grow up in Newark in the 1940s and 50s.

[Alice Golin]

Perfect! Not a wasted word. The simplicity of the language captures both the moment and the angst. Could have been uncool me in the beauty shop.

[Beth Joselow]

I love this poem. Used to accompany my little brother to the Tony Barbershop. Agree-- perfect.

[Barbara]

I love the poem. I love the last line. I think many of us thought that way in those young years. For me, my parents thought a beauty parlor was too expensive so I would get perms in someone’s kitchen. Imagine how that came out! And when I wanted bangs my dad would cut them. I never looked like the cool girls.

[Barbara Worton]

I saw the barbershop, felt that sick knowing you are the outsider and always will be—will never get one of Jimmy’s cuts. Every word of Paul’s poem goes straight to the heart, taps into our universal desire to belong and to be seen. Brilliant work, as always, by Mr. Genega.

[Felice Nudelman]

I love this poem, great example of how Paul Genega’s poetry is so deep and moving. So many great poems in the new book, I keep rereading and rereading.

[Cliff]

I love this poem.

[Dr. Earle Hitchner]

Petrarchan, Shakespearean, and Spenserian are sonnet forms bearing the names of their creators or greatest practitioners. But lurking in each fourteen-line form is a danger of meter or rhyme becoming metronomic. In “Clip / Caste” Paul Genega expertly employs often run-in lines of unrhymed couplets to advance the action without any hint of a metronomic effect. The poem’s outcast is the “I” narrator, not one of “the cool boys.” It is told through his lens: unfriended, “glum in the back,” who “predictably” gets “Pete,” the least desirable of the four barbers. Genega’s use of punctuation is instructive: his fourteen-line poem uses a period nine times. The longest stretch without one is from “Jimmy” in the fourth line to “combs” in the ninth line. It’s as if the narrator wants to speed through the humbling (humiliating?) experience of getting “Pete, short guy with the fourth chair / who quickly snips, buzzes, rubs in green goo, combs.” (Was that “green goo” Trol, which turned a boy’s hair into a helmet after it dried? If so, it adds to the mortification evoked here.) It’s not the “clip” itself (“our haircuts … all look perfectly the same”) that makes you lose “caste.” It’s the one who gives it and the one who gets it--otherwise known as “settling.” Puerile pecking orders can be hard to shake. Genega captures all of that in his rueful, stingingly impressive sonnet.

[Terence Winch]

Earle: Thanks for bringing your trademark insight and expertise to your reading of the poem.

[Paul Genega]

Thanks for the helpful, insightful analysis. Much appreciated.

[Sweetie Pie]

I love this poem

[Elizabeth]

What a timeless moment this captures — I can place my own two teenagers right into this snippet of a past world and their ache would be the same.