Sam Norman's new book, A Teen's Guide to Modern Manners, is a witty, hilarious, and completely delightful collection of poems featuring cautionary tales about teenagers whose poor choices, from leaving clothes on the floor to making a catastrophically rude comment about a girlfriend's hair, lead to comic disaster.
There's "Ben, whose penchant for computer games led to a sad existence," "James, whose flagrant disregard for personal hygiene changed his life for the worse," "Tim, who made sexist jokes and got exactly what he was asking for," and "Melissa, who lost both her legs because she wore skinny jeans the entire time." The understated humor, dead-on depictions, and surprising and lyrical rhymes from Norman and charming illustrations by Jack Parham, both still in their teens themselves, can convey some worthwhile lessons to kids who want to know how to behave but do not want to hear it from adults. There are a few sly digs at adults as well, as with the tiger parents of "Chris, who took himself very seriously and underwent a strange reaction."
How dare you rest? How dare you fail?
You think that's how you'll get to Yale?
Don't play with other kids! They're rowdy!
You think they'll graduate cum laude?
In an interview, Norman talked about what poems can convey that other forms of communication cannot and which of the poems' transgressions were inspired by his own family.
Do you remember the first poem you ever wrote?
I certainly do remember! I was five, and our teacher had us write acrostic poems using the word MUMMY. I was especially pleased with the last line, which read "'Yum yum,' says Mum" - it had absolutely no relevance to the rest of the poem, but I was fiercely proud of the internal rhyme. I'm pretty sure my mother still has it pinned up on her office wall.
What can poems convey that essays, Buzzfeed listicles, and rap music cannot?
Well, there's poetry and 'poetry'. So-called 'proper' poetry has to achieve a high level of emotional accuracy, and distill a feeling in a way that is (hopefully) moving or meaningful. The 'poetry' you find in my book is essentially playful: it's intended to be comic, and the whole thing is written in strict iambic tetrameter couplets ("tee-TUM-tee-TUM-tee-TUM-tee-TUM"). That's not to disparage it, but it's useful to know what we're talking about.
The relevance of this latter kind of 'poetry' is that it's gloriously artificial; it should charm and be witty and make people laugh! It should have the cleverness of essays, the humour of Buzzfeed listicles and the technical impressiveness of rap. This makes it sound rather trivial, but I actually think it's colossally important: it should be a funny, memorable way of capturing the joyfulness of life, as well as sneaking in the odd moral. I think Dr Seuss is a great ethical teacher of our times.
How have manners changed since the previous generation as a result of technology and social media?
I suppose the accepted wisdom is that social media has been a negative influence: it often causes interactions to be fleeting and anonymous, with no requirement for either side to behave decently. If you look down any Youtube comment thread, you can see huge levels of racism, misogyny, Hitler references and so on. I also think it over-privileges the sensational: clickbait becomes preferable to thoughtful analysis, headlines become more important than stories, and people rarely fact-check what they read.
But there's another aspect to social media which can be overlooked - the way in which it is sometimes a tremendous force for good. It gives a voice to people who historically might never have had one; it creates communities that in other times never would have existed. It can be incredibly funny. It allows news to be spread faster than ever before. It gives people the ability to mobilise, and to stay informed about situations in real time. On a personal level, I'll always be grateful for the way it's meant I can stay close to people living on the other side of the world.
You mention Hilaire Belloc as an inspiration, but his poems were directed at children. Why did you want to write poems for teenagers?
For those who don't know, Hilaire Belloc wrote a set of "Cautionary Tales for Children" in the early 1900s, all in verse, which told stories of children whose tiny flaws proved their grisly comeuppances. Given that my poems are modern spin-offs of his, written in the same style, I didn't make a particularly conscious choice about what my target market would be; although they narrate the gruesome ends of misbehaving teenagers, my hope is that the poems can be enjoyed by all the family.
The look of the pages adds a great deal to the charm of the book. What did you want to accomplish with the illustrations?
I'm glad you mention them! The illustrations are my favorite part of the book - they were done by my friend Jack Parham, who, like me, was a teenager at the time. Even if you loathe poetry, buy the book for a masterclass in witty illustrating! They're incredibly distinctive and funny, and add enormously to the effect. I tend to think this kind of poetry volume should always be illustrated - Roald Dahl and Quentin Blake, for example, complement each other so well that it's difficult to imagine one without the other.
Do you ever experiment with different poem forms? Do you ever try to write song lyrics, and how is that different?
I do - in fact, my first attempt at song lyrics (title: "Apologies") was so hilariously awful that I still get teased about it today. Since then, I've tied my colours to a different mast: musical theatre. Last Christmas, I wrote a musical called "Pawn" with a friend - all about the bizarre 1978 World Chess Championship Final - and we took it to the Edinburgh Fringe, where we had an utterly amazing and exhausting time. At the moment I'm working on two more: one about Cyrano de Bergerac, and another about the Greek myth of Medea.
As for poetry more generally, I do my best. My current project is a novel in verse, like Vikram Seth's "The Golden Gate" and Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin" - which makes it sound horrendously pretentious, but I'm hoping it won't be! It's about five students starting out together at university, and the difficulties (real and imagined) of late adolescence. The working title is "Cherry Trees."
Are the people in your poems inspired by real-life bad manners you have observed or had inflicted on you? Which do you think is the most annoying or inexcusable?
Actually, for the last few years there's been a running joke in my family that whenever I need inspiration I should just look at myself and my siblings; we're apparently a rich source of material. A couple of the poems are loosely based on them, but mostly they're just the product of hours spent sitting around, thinking about what habits I find irritating and devising ways in which they could lead to sticky ends. I'll leave it for you to decide which are the truly inexcusable traits.
The swiftest, surest teenage phase,
Which seems pandemic nowadays,
Is that adolescent crime
Of texting all the bloody time.
You can tell me - have you been guilty of any of the transgressions you write about? Are you making lists of impolite behavior for a second volume?
Oh, most of them! When I finished writing "Chris" and showed it to my Mum, her response was, "It's good - but it's obvious that it's really you." I definitely leave clothes on the floor, I'm sure I often take myself too seriously, and in fact the last poem is explicitly about me. (It narrates the story of a boy called Sam, who couldn't do his math homework and died of gross overwork. There's a funny story behind it.) As for a second volume, time will tell! If the first book doesn't remedy all of society's youth problems, then another one might be in order...