By Margaret Rozga, Wisconsin Poet Laureate

My favorite poem?” He smiled, looked away, then back at me, and sighed.

“Wow. That is really a difficult choice,” said Joe Foy, Vice-President for Academic Affairs at Alverno College.

We first met some 20 years ago when he was a newly hired assistant professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin – Waukesha where I was a professor of English.

We have talked over the years about teaching, about civil rights, politics, popular culture, and even theater, but somehow we hadn’t talked about poetry. Yet once I posed my question, I realized that he found the question difficult not because he didn’t know poetry, but because he had many favorite poems. “I have been consistently moved and haunted,” he said, “by TS Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men,’ and I was once told by a friend in high school that I was the reason Eliot wrote ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,’ which I really hope was a horribly wrong assessment.” 

Among Dr. Foy’s other favorites are Maya Angelou’s “Alone” and the 40th Psalm. The poem that emerged favorite, though, is a poem by Marian University English professor Christina Kubasta. She read it at the start of a meeting of the Marian University’s College of Arts, Sciences and Letters (Fond du Lac, WI) about the time Joe began as the college’s dean. Professor Kubasta’s poem, “At the
Ten-In-One, aside from the Born Freaks” brings him a sense of purpose.

The poem’s title presents the subject of a sentence, a fragment that is then picked up and completed with the verb in the first line: “aside from the Born Freaks / are Working Acts, Strongmen & women with particular talents / perhaps.” The poem continues with attention to the people put on display in a sideshow tent. But it does more. As Dr. Foy notes, the poem “is about human exploitation and isolation and identity as told through performers in what is horribly referred to as ‘Freak Shows’ at a circus.” That exploitation often went unacknowledged, but it is brought forward here, for example, in the case of the Strong Man: 

Jobs without insurance, with no-notice rotating shifts, poor safety 

records, laughed out of the boss’s office when he says he wants a job
where he can spend time with his wife, his little girl (when she was a baby

he could hold her upright in the palm of his hand). Because if you’re blue-
collar, or working-class, this is what work is: Take what you’re given

The pace of these lines alternates between the stop/start of briefer phrases and the rush of longer ones pleading for recognition of shared human bonds and dignity. The three long “o” sounds in “no-notice rotating” gives that phrase particular punch. The parentheses are another way of bringing attention to the day-to-day life and poignant memories of the workers. 

The poem takes us several steps deeper into what’s behind the scenes. Injured, workers “end up at the hospital, / where they’ll drug test you before they treat you.” For these accidents, moreover, the circus owners take no responsibility, but “blame the dockworker from the Texas-/ Mexico border.” 

The strong images and insistence on seeing what lies behind appearances at the sideshow give the poem its power. Joe describes the effect it has for him. “It is a beautiful tragedy and it makes me feel both terribly sad and also angry and also inspired to make the world different—to make it a place where the most vulnerable feel the love that their mind, body and souls deserve, and to make it a place where people seek to build up and support and live in beautiful diversity. It makes me want to end exploitation and advocate for justice.”

Through its word craft and the deep seeing of the poet, poetry can and does help us as readers see what we may have missed, what had been kept from sight, and in doing so, it can steer us in a positive direction as we do whatever our work is in this world.

Here, courtesy of Professor Christina Kubasta is a copy of her poem, a favorite of Dr. Joe Foy.

At the Ten-In-One, aside from the Born Freaks 

are Working Acts, Strongmen & women with particular talents,
perhaps. Barkers hint what’s behind the curtain. Behind the curtain, 

a man is fingerless, digits lost to blast or machine — the magic
is what he learns to do with his stumps. Beside him is his woman, 

who attests what he’s learned to do with his stumps (this isn’t suitable
for women or children, this kootchie-show). The Strongman is huge, always

has been; he’s here after being worked like a beast anyway.
Jobs without insurance, with no-notice rotating shifts, poor safety 

records, laughed out of the boss’s office when he says he wants a job
where he can spend time with his wife, his little girl (when she was a baby

he could hold her upright in the palm of his hand). Because if you’re blue-
collar, or working-class, this is what work is: Take what you’re given–

when the beam in the truck springs loose, you end up at the hospital,
where they’ll drug test you before they treat you. When the beam

in the truck springs loose, they’ll try to blame the dockworker from the Texas-
Mexico border before they file the report. When the beam in the truck springs 

loose, they’ll put you on light duty, no driving, but make you drive to work every
day to check in, against doctor’s orders. And when your father is dying, you

cannot take off, because you didn’t request the time two weeks ahead, cleared
through the floor manager, the foreman. Death isn’t orderly like lines 

through the Side Show, like the careful tease of the Barker’s script.
You’ve seen human skeletons, the Fat Lady, the Tattooed Lady, too much skin

& not enough. Jars hold pickled punks, some strange animals. One sad man
reminds you of your cousin, prescription-addled. Before the end

is the Blowoff Act, and they ask for more, they always ask for more.

For more about Christina Kubasta and her poetry, see www.ckubasta.com.