......................................................
Tomorrow is my father’s birthday.......................................................
Tomorrow my Holidays start.................................................
To m o r r o w i s.........................................................
To m o r r o w i s.........................................................
To m o r r o w i s‘Poem Found in a Dime Store Diary’ (Young 1972, p. 190)This text is a list of slips that the manufacturer has designed for diary
owners to put in their diaries to mark off important days. However, if we
look at it through literary rather than practical eyes, we can see that the
structure and layout could be viewed as quasi-poetic (the text is in lines
with a repetitive structure which binds them together). Furthermore,
presenting the text as a poem turns it into a parodic comment about con-
temporary values. The critic Stephen Matterson has suggested, for example,
that the poem explores what society expects of an individual. Individuals
are assumed to have a husband or wife, and to celebrate birthdays and
anniversaries. They will be married, in employment and family conscious.
Being single, gay, unemployed, illegitimate or alienated from the family are
by implication deviant forms of behaviour (Matterson 1990).
These ideas are given significance by presenting the diary slips as a poem.
We subject the text to the metaphorical and semantic scrutiny that we
would normally bring to a literary work. Such an approach may well open
up the text to multiple interpretations. For example, even if we agree with
Matterson’s interpretation of the poem, we might want to qualify it by
pointing out that the last few slips are left blank for the owner to fill in. This
could mean that they point tentatively to a space for social and cultural
difference. In other words, we could also find some ambiguity in the piece.
Matterson points out that the reiteration of ‘Tomorrow is’ at the end of
the poem echoes Macbeth’s ‘To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow’
speech in Shakespeare’s play (Matterson 1990). Presumably the words
‘tomorrow’ and ‘tomorrow’ are not designed in the original text to be
deliberate echoes of Macbeth, but the author has cleverly chosen his found
76 The Writing Experiment