By Jeff Weddle
One fine day in 1990, I sat watching television in some cheap hotel room in Athens, Georgia with Paula Fountain and Jerry Williams. The three of us were on a road trip to visit universities where Paula and I were thinking of applying to Ph.D. programs in English. Jerry was still a couple of years from his BA at Morehead State University, but he was Paula’s boyfriend, so he came along for the ride. We had already been to Gainesville to see what Florida had to offer, and now we were checking out the University of Georgia.
We all thought of ourselves as poets and Paula, who published a fair amount in the little magazines around that time was a pure talent. Jerry had only recently fallen in with our crew--which pretty much meant Paula, me, Eric Cash, and Laura Caudill Cash, who may or may not have already been divorced by this point, but were still friendly. Jerry started writing poems when he started seeing Paula. Like the rest of us, he sent his stuff out to the magazines and, also like the rest of us, occasionally scored a publication.
We’d rolled into town an hour or so earlier and taken our turns in the shower and now were about to head to campus. The television was background noise while we got ourselves ready and I was about to turn it off when a commercial came on advertising Barbie dolls. I had seen this commercial, or ones like it, more times than I can name and thought nothing of it. Who knows why, this time, I was offended?
Like those commercials usually do, this one hawked Barbie in one of her many professional or adventure sets and something about that struck me as awful. Right then, Barbie stood for every bad cog in the American machine: racism, sexism, the exploitation of women, economic oppression, mindless consumerism. You name it. If it was a cultural horror, I blamed Barbie.
Was this fair? Who the hell knows and why do you care? What matters is this: When the commercial ended, I said to Paula and Jerry, “Why don’t they just sell an Anal Sex Barbie and get it over with?” I guess we all laughed about that. It’s funny, right? Am I right? Well, maybe you had to be there.
As I mentioned earlier, we fancied ourselves poets. That’s why the next thing I did was write this clever thing I’d said onto a scrap of paper, and right after that I wrote the first in a series of what, over the next couple of weeks, became twenty-five or so Barbie poems. This first one was a short little number and when I finished it I ditched Anal Sex in favor of Cornhole, which to my ear was a good deal funnier. I doubt that I spent more than five minutes composing the poem and sticking it in my pocket so we could head out and see what there was to see in Athens.
As anyone who has been there can attest, Athens is a coolio little town. We walked around campus, hit bars on the strip, generally had a blast. And the next day we drove back to Morehead.
So, I started sending my Barbie poems to the magazines. I don’t know how many I sent out, or where I sent them, but I do remember that I got a long, handwritten rejection from the editor at some hipper-than-though rag. He went out of his way to tell me that my poems were crummy, but that a friend of his was also writing Barbie poems, which were, of course, just fab. Well, okay then. Nice to know.
For some reason, I sent a big batch of Barbies to Cheryl Ann Townsend, proprietor of Impetus magazine and Implosion Press. Cheryl – everybody called her CAT, so that’s what we’ll do from here on out—ran a one-woman shop in Stowe, Ohio, publishing bleeding edge literature in beautiful, energetic formats. I’d sent CAT poems many times before and only once had she taken anything, a short poem slyly referencing masturbation, “Getting that Hair Sticky,” which she published in a special issue called Impetus Erotica. So, I knew CAT was particular about what she published and was not prepared for what happened next.
CAT saw merit in the poems, I guess, because she accepted ten of them and wrote that she would publish them together as a low-end chapbook. This made me happy happy happy. I had published dozens of poems in the little magazines, but never had I had my own, stand-alone publication.
Running a press all by your lonesome is an arduous task, and it took CAT a while to finish the project. In the meantime, I’d picked Ole Miss for graduate school and was sharing a busted up trailer in Oxford with Eric Cash. So, it was in Oxford that one day I went to pick up the mail and found a box from Implosion Press. It could only be one thing.
Getting that box was like the promise of sex. This was my first time with my own publication and I wanted to make it special. I didn’t have much money, but decided that the thing to do was take the box to a restaurant I liked and could afford and open it there. So, Long John Silvers, it was.
My fingers were greasy with fish when I opened the box and found a stack of very thin, very white booklets with the title, Not Another Blonde Joke: Poems from the mind of Jeff Weddle. CAT included what amounted to a brief biography on the copyright page: “Jeff Weddle lives in Mississippi. Maybe that explains these poems.”
Do I have to tell you that I was delighted with all of it? Overjoyed? Practically overcome? Well, I was.
I don’t know what became of most of the stack I found in that box. I still have one copy, and I believe that special collections at Yale and Brown Universities, for some reason, have their own.
Not so very long after Not Another Blonde Joke appeared, I got a call from Richard Peabody, telling me he was putting together Mondo Barbie for a major New York publisher, St. Martin’s Press. I guess Richard and CAT were friends and she, bless her, put him onto me. Before I hung up the phone, I remembered the snotty letter I received a few months back from the editor of that too-cool-for-school little mag and told Richard the name of the person who was supposedly writing the definitive Barbie poems. He thanked me and told me he would follow up. That person and I both had work accepted for Mondo Barbie and I remain proud of myself for passing the name along to Richard.
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