Apr

28

Book ‘Em: A Wild And Crazy Writer.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

April 28, 2008 |

martin.jpgMy teacher fifth grade teacher had a collection of brief biographies of people who, at the time, were pretty famous. One that I remember was about a new comedian that started off, “Steve Martin is a wild and crazy guy…or is he?”

It was a surprising portrait of a man who came across one way on television—a nutty character who made balloon animals, wore an arrow through his head, and had all of us saying, “Well excuuuuuuuuuse me!”—and yet was completely different in private. He was a shy, private, thoughtful person, a deep thinker who collected American art. There were signs of the man behind the mask, though, such as his collection of prose poems Cruel Shoes, first published in 1979. He also performed the book’s title piece on his album Comedy Is Not Pretty.

Well, I say they were prose poems, although the moderators of The Compleat Steve describe it as a collection of “short absurd pieces that are not easily classified”. They were considered prose poems by the editors of the prose poem anthology Models Of The Universe, who included a few of Martin’s pieces, including Demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres.

Mr. Rivers was raised in the city of New York, had become involved in construction and slowly advanced himself to the level of crane operator for a demolition company. The firm had grown enormously, and he was shipped off to France for a special job. He started work early on Friday and, due to a poorly drawn map, at six-thirty one morning in February began the demolition of the Cathedral at Chartres.

The first swing of the ball knifed an arc so deadly that it tore down nearly a third of a wall and the glass shattered almost intones, and it seemed to scream over the noise of the engine as the fuel was pumped in the long neck of the crane that threw the ball through a window of the Cathedral at Chartres.

The aftermath was complex and chaotic, and Rivers was allowed to go home to New York, and he opened up books on the Cathedral and read about it and thought to himself how lucky he was to have seen it before it was destroyed.

With several decades of work to his credit now perhaps it isn’t nearly so surprising that there’s more to Steve Martin than his crazy persona. Since 2001 he’s been a Master of Ceremonies at the National Book Awards, and has written numerous books, including Shopgirl, Pure Drivel (another collection of hard to classify pieces), Born Standing Up: A Comic’s Life, and plays, including Picasso At The Lapin Agile, which is about a fictional meeting between Picasso and Albert Einstein.

Having started National Poetry Month with comedians and prose poems, it seems only fitting to see it out with prose poems by a comedian…or is it comedy by a poet? Like the prose poem, Steve Martin is difficult to classify.

Introduction

You are walking down a country road. It is a quiet afternoon. You look up and far, far down the road you see someone walking toward you. You are surprised to have noticed someone so far away. But you keep walking, expecting nothing more than a friendly nod as you pass. He gets closer. You see he has bright orange hair. He is closer- a white sating suit spotted with colored dots. Closer-a painted white face and red lips. You and he are fifty yards apart. You, and a full-fledged clown holding a bicycle horn are twenty yards apart. You approach on the lonely country road. You nod. He honks and passes.


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