Before you undertake the staggering endeavor of reading “Little Pigs of India”, I would like to give a brief account of the circumstances under which it was written. The year was 1954, I was stationed in Algiers with the 44th Battalion of the Parachute division of the French Army. I had just achieved the rank of colonel and was leading an infantry of 40,000 men against the insurrectionists. I awoke one night bathed in sweat and intolerably parched. I walked to the sink to fill my glass when I espied in the distance a group of my infantrymen doing squats, cavorting, gamboling, and bantering with a ribald glee. At that moment I felt so proud of those chaps that I dropped my thermos, stepped on some shards of glass, and ran to my table to write “Little Pigs of India” bleeding all the while. It was the first poem I had ever written and, I don’t believe it would overstating the case to say it changed the very complexion and trajectory of the medium. It essentially introduced a new kind of poetics , a peerless patois of selfless gallantry and daring reportage, at once an infinitely complex tapestry of visceral humanity (or pig-manity) and a bittersweet paean to human (or pig) folly, a caustic indictment of contemporary mores segueing into an iridescent spectrum of emotion imagistically rendered through the prism of both the toiling everyman and the haggard malcontent. So without further ado, I present my masterpiece, my magnum opus, my child:
Little Pigs of India
by Nicholas Paul Castellucci
Onward, onward you noble swine*!
Tonight in hell shall we dine.
Mounted on elephants no bigger than a dog,
We shall defeat the enemy†, three cheers for the hog.
Our names will be forever engraved,
And roads in our honor‡ will duly be paved.
We cannot mow a lawn nor rent a movie.
But we can defend our land in armor groovy.
We will soar the peak of bleating heroics.
Despite our triumph, the pig remains stoic §,
We have no paws, nor feet, nor claws
But we’d rather die than on our bellies crawl ‖.
A Reflection
It is imperative that the reader keep in mind that this poem is not based on actual events, but is rather an imaginative account of a group of very brave anthropomorphic pigs who, in the face of adversity, fought valiantly for the honor and security of their brethren. Exegesis of this poem has been equivocal, naturally. Scholars have offered many disparate interpretations of my poem. I would advise the first-time reader to peruse the poem several times before endeavoring to interpret it.
The first time you read it should be just for fun. Don’t focus too much on the meanings of words (which are frequently esoteric) and just try to get a feel for the rhythm of the poem. This way you can acclimate your mind to nebulous intensity of this harrowing work. On the second reading I would recommend you pay specific attention to the meter of the poem. I, Monroe, was extremely innovative in my utilization of meter. Being the iconoclast I am, I have never enjoyed adhering to convention so I at once rejected the standard convention of meter characterized by any sort of alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables and instead decided that every vowel would be read as stressed, except for the first syllable of “countrymen” in the seventh line and the second syllable in “defend” in the twelfth line. Tottering on the edge of the insecure precipice of overemphasis, I succeeded in imbuing my poem with a powerful overtone of impending destruction undergirded by the enigmatic suspicion that true resolution and revelation is found in irresolution. The speaker, who we can rightly assume is the leader of the pigs ( I imagined him to be a lowly foot-soldier who rose to prominence through sheer cunning and displays of valor) feels the weight of his duty to bolster his soldier’s morale and must therefore enunciate clearly and vehemently every word of his exhortation.
Thucydides in his “History of the Peloponnesian War” poignantly illustrates the importance of being elocutionarily adept as a leader. Needless to say, Thucydides was an endless font of inspiration when writing “Little Pigs of India”. In addition to Thucydides, I drew heavily from an array of different Ancient Greek sources including Xenophon and Herodotus. For instance the line “tonight is hell shall we dine” paraphrases a statement attributed, perhaps apocryphally, to the Spartan King Leonidas who says “tonight we dine in hell.” This is borrowed from Herodotus and can be heard in 300. Some critics, most notable Patel Varner, have censured me, Monroe, for having a supposedly Indian pig refer to hell which is not a salient feature of the Hindu religion. Setting aside the fact that these pigs are not, in fact, from India (I will elaborate later), I feel that as a poet I do not have to assume the duties of a journalist. I have long ago cast off the shackles of paltry verisimilitude and the transparent pretensions of objectivity; as a writer my main mission is to report subjective experience with the conscientiousness and nuance to which I owe my craft.
Drake Fulton once said of “Little Pigs of India”, “The imagery which Monroe conjures is wrought with poetic tension but also rendered with a brash prosaic candor which is perhaps the pivot of the entire poem.” I wholeheartedly agree with Prof. Fulton’s appraisal and believe the poem derives its dynamism from the use of verbs. I always use verbs to express a sort of action. For me, a verb is always unlike a noun. If one studies my poetry carefully, one will glean that I rarely if ever use a verb to denote an object. Verbs in my poetry always describe what an object does rather than what it is in any Platonic or nominal sense of the word. At the time “Little Pigs of India was published, most poets could only muster only so much courage as to use one or two verbs at the most. Most poets were downright afraid to use action-oriented words lest the audience become overwhelmed or offended. I was bold enough to include words like “defeat” and “fight”, words which convey the aggressive nature of these intrepid pigs. Because of my flagrant use of verbs, I initially had a hard time finding a periodical to publish the work. McCarthyism was still in its heyday and verbs were considered “seditious and un-American.” It was thought that use of verbs would lead to Communist activity, so I had a hard time getting my poem published in America. More on this later.
Another significant topos which [The manuscript ends here. Basil Monroe was found on July 7th, 2009 alone in his one room apartment in the upper east side of Manhanttan with a bullet lodged in his brain. The autopsy confirmed that it was suicide. He was survived by his Armenian Grandmother who seems to have a vague recollection of him. The DMV stated that replacing him will not be a great challenge and he will be somewhat missed.
Forensics have discovered the endnotes to “Little Pigs of India” under his bathtub:
* Swine, another word for pig, an animal not found in a zoo, but sometimes found in a petting zoo. They are pink and commonly regarded as cute (when children). Sometimes used as a pejorative term to describe someone slovenly or rude.
† The enemy is ambiguous throughout the poem. I intentionally avoided describing the enemy to imply that the enemy is really in our own minds. This sense of uncertainty permeates the entire tone of the poem and is cleverly juxtaposed to resolute nature of the pigs’ courage.
‡ If pigs did pave roads then I imagine they would commemorate the deeds of other heroic pigs. Some might accuse me of having a Eurocentric view in this regard — that I am chauvinistically importing certain staples and canons of human (specifically Western European) society into my imaginary pig society without bothering to take into account the unique circumstances of anthropomorphic pigs. I believe pigs would most likely base their society on a Smithean paradigm.
§ Stoicism was a predominantly Hellenistic school of though founded by Zeno of Citium in the 3rd century BC. A solemn, quasi-religious philosophy based on being in moral harmony with the universe. Stoicism emphasized the necessity of having full mastery over your emotions and the inter-workings of the mind. This is one of the sillier lines in the poem as the whole notion of a pig being stoic is just ridiculous.
‖ After much deliberation I finally settled on this last ennobling image of a pig who would rather die than suffer under the yolk of his adversaries. The spirit of these pigs is powerful and can pull many a human through hard times. I myself feel if I were one of these pigs, if I had even a modicum of the courage and resiliency which these pigs possess perhaps I too could one day do something momentous!
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