Dad Joke

Literature's lowest form.

Here’s an interview I did for The Paris Review blog. Topics include how I wrote “Sissy Spacek” (a list poem of celebrity names in the current fall issue), bad titles, the saving power of metonymy, why some poems are hard and others are easy, and the structure of list poems in general.

Dad Joke

The best dad joke my dad ever told
was in 2001 when I was helping him
after our pigs escaped. It took us all day
to get them back in the pen, and that night
when we tried to figure out how they got loose,
we learned the wooden gate had slipped off its hinge.

Me kneeling, him holding the flashlight
over my shoulder, I scrutinized the gate,
thinking it could’ve been sabotage
by a rival pork operation, or recalcitrant teens,
or something like that—only to realize
the gate was just a hundred years old,
and the dew we get in this part of the Sierras
(it never rains, but there’s dew every morning)

had gradually warped the joist over the century
or so that the farm had been in our family,
and on that morning, it had finally deformed
the wood enough to curl the gate off its hinge.
The song “Who Let the Dogs Out” by Baha men
had been playing nonstop that summer,
and when I explained what I thought had
happened to my dad, he looked at me
and then declared, “Dew let the hogs out…”
in the unmistakable cadence of the song.

Dew let the hogs out.

This dad joke was bad when my dad was alive
and I wasn’t yet a dad, but now that my dad is
dead, and I am a dad, this dad joke is good.