I am not one for academia. I have always seen it as a means to an end, with the occasional impactful lecture here or there. One of those moments for me was not in university, but my final year of high school where my AP English Literature teacher showed us the poem “Box of Cigars”. His name was Mr. Ellrott, the cool English teacher who wore short-sleeve button downs and taught us while sitting forwards on the desk. He sometimes swore, he’d let me play music on easy days, (once remarking that he “blew out the speakers in his car” to Aquemini by Outkast) and had countless impactful conversations with our class.
Yet, the thing that sticks with me most from that time is Gerald Stern’s poem. It revives the joy I found in youth and the beautiful moments of a fairly unforgiving world.
The story told in ‘Box of Cigars’ is that of a man tossing stale cigars from his window in a mild act of hubris, only to notice homeless people below begin to smoke them. He feels immediate guilt and goes down to them, only to end up smoking alongside them. I’ve always felt an understanding with Stern’s protagonist from the first time I read his poem. While I am not schooled with cigars, I too will sometimes air my pretensions in a similar nature. And, much like the man in the poem, I have often felt guilty because of it.
Stern’s speaker spends much of the poem in atonement; in its short length, the reader gets a clear sense that he seems compensatory of his initial boastfulness. He later admits ‘we were living on beans ourselves’ and goes to great lengths to prove to the reader just how stale the cigars were that justifies their being tossed.
Yet for all the detail in this poem, I love it almost entirely for the impact of its final line: ‘We were visionaries.’ I’ve often greatly related to the sentiment here and feel it captures the idea of “joy as an act of resistance.” The speaker is a poor man in a cruel world. He recognises that he is not as disadvantaged as the homeless below him, but is still the victim of an unfair system. While he initially tries to separate himself into the higher standing of a classy-cigar-aficionado, he realises that not only is he akin to them but there is humanity in simple acts of connection.
While I am privileged enough to have never been close to homelessness, as a university student increasingly worried about my prospects in this world and feeling dejected by life’s cruel fates, I understand the narrator well. There have been several moments where drunk and sniffling, I have thought in my head ‘we were visionaries.’
There is so much honesty and love in the appreciation of life’s little joys, like a free cigar, stale or not, dropped from a window and smoked with a friend on the stoop on a cold night. I could tell Mr. Ellrott understood that, and understood that poems like these were much more important for us to really understand than those with over- complicated meaning. While academics may measure knowledge in grades and capitalists in wealth, the smartest and most joyous people I’ve come to know generally have neither. Rather, they have passion and a persistence to move on to the next day and know that eventually a cigar will fall from a window.
Box of Cigars
I tried one or two but they were stale
and broke like sticks or crumbled when I rolled them and lighting a match was useless nor could I
put them back in the refrigerator—
it was too late for that—even licking them
filled my mouth with ground-up outer leaf,
product of Lancaster or eastern Virginia,
so schooled I am with cigars, it comes in the blood, and I threw handfuls of them into the street
from three floors up and, to my horror, sitting
on my stoop were four or five street people
who ran to catch them as if they were suddenly rich, and I apologize for that, no one should
be degraded that way, my hands were crazy,
and I ran down to explain but they were smoking already nor did I have anything to give them
since we were living on beans ourselves, I sat
and smoked too, and once in a while we looked
up at the open window, and one of us spit
into his empty can. We were visionaries.
Gerald Stern, “Box of Cigars,” American Sonnets (W. W. Norton and Company Inc., 2002)
Image: Martin Burns via Flickr