By Nick Grabbe

What does a writer of light verse do when he learns that the cancer he thought he’d survived has spread, and he has to undergo chemotherapy and surgery? He writes  poems about it, of course.

Chris O’Carroll has had many creative pursuits and personas in his 72 years. He has been the Valley Advocate’s first arts editor, a staff writer for UMass magazine, an actor on local stages, Amherst Bulletin movie reviewer and a stand-up comedian.

For the past 20 years Chris has focused on poetry, and he has won numerous prizes for his light verse in online British journals. Two of his poems about cancer and chemotherapy have been published and two others have been accepted for publication.

“I knew it was something I had to write about,” he said recently. “Some events in your life are so big, you know you have to write about them.”

Chris found out that he had colon cancer after a colonoscopy in 2018. Before the cancerous cells were cut out, the gastroenterologist tattooed a circle around them to guide the surgeon.

“Having cancer is not funny, but having a tattoo on my colon is funny,” he said. And he mused that if he died in his seventies, he wouldn’t have to worry about having dementia in his eighties. “That will be a plus, I guess,” he said.

Although he had Stage 4 cancer, his type is considered curable. He almost made it to the five-year mark with no detectable malignancies, the standard for being considered cancer-free. But last fall an MRI showed that the cancer had shown up in his liver.

So he started chemotherapy, and on Feb. 28 a surgeon removed one third of his liver. In his poem “Chemo,” published in Snakeskin, he shared his ambivalence about the drugs:

My gut’s a messy picture book
These days. You might not care to look.
The operation that we thought
Had got it all? Well, it did not.
Now chemicals have hatched a plan
To kill the baddest cells they can.
The villains they are out to whack
Have got to go. Hail that attack!
Yet this drug mix skews my insides
By offing other prey besides.
While lethal to malignancies,
In crucial ways it fails to please:
It snuffs benign cells on which I
Rely as I try not to die.
I love and hate this stuff. That’s why.

Pursuits and Personas

Chris O’Carroll, who lives in Pelham, has close ties to this area. The oldest of eight children, he and his car-less family moved to North Prospect Street from the Boston suburbs in 1968 when his father became the first dean of humanities and arts at Hampshire College. Four of his siblings still live in the area.

After dropping out of college, he joined a bizarre religious cult called the Process Church of the Final Judgment, where he was known as Brother Jerome. He spent four years selling magazines and preaching on the streets of cities, mostly in New Orleans. He met and married a cult member named Sister Meredith, who became Karen Smith after they left the cult behind. They have two sons and in 2022, they celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary.

After leaving the cult, they moved to a basement apartment in Amherst and he reclaimed his birth name, Charles C. Smith. He started writing for the Advocate, then a fledgling alternative newspaper based in Amherst. He was arts and entertainment editor during a period of rapid growth in the Advocate’s scope and readership. For most of this time, he had not yet learned to drive a car. 

In the ’80s, at the UMass alumni magazine, he interviewed and wrote articles about such campus figures as evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. As a movie reviewer for the Amherst Bulletin, he often employed offbeat styles such as adopting the language of a caveman in a review of “Quest for Fire.”

He has had acting roles at Mount Holyoke Summer Theater and at regional theater companies around the country. At the college’s children’s theater, he played Eeyore from “Winnie the Pooh” and Badger from “Wind in the Willows.”

Karen became a history professor at a university in Kansas, and he joined her there. He became a stand-up comedian with the stage name Chris O’Carroll, which he chose because it was the surname of an Irish ancestor and because it was more “ethnically distinctive” than Smith.

Doing mostly political comedy, he performed in over 100 clubs, restaurants and lounges in the Midwest during their 17 years there. When George W. Bush was waging war in Iraq, he did a joke about a Bush action figure: “When you pull the string, it says ‘Bring it on!’ Then it hides behind GI Joe.” 

At age 57, he got an Actors’ Equity card and still pays dues to the union. He changed his legal name to Chris O’Carroll.

Between stand-up comedy, theater and poetry readings, he has performed in more than half of the 50 states.

Poetic License

He self-published his first book of poems, Take These Rhymes…Please in 2000, and sold it at his comedy gigs. In the author’s note, he wrote, “If you thought Chris O’Carroll’s stand-up comedy was an unsightly stain on the fabric of civilization, wait till you get a load of his poetry.”

The book is composed mostly of ribald limericks. This one was his first prize winner, in a British contest sponsored by the Leicester Arts Festival:

I asked a bright infant from Leicester
Whether he was a bottler or a breicester.
He said, “Mummy for me!
When it’s time for my tea,
I just unzip her dress and ingeicester.

Chris has published three other collections of poems, Shakespeare’s Marijuana, The Joke’s on Me and Abracadabratude, and been the featured poet at a reading at the Emily Dickinson Museum.

Although much of his poetry is humorous, he also has a serious side. He’s published sonnets about flowers and about his love for Karen. (Till Death Do Us Part has been used in at least one marriage ceremony.) In his latest volume, published in 2021, his subjects range from theology to tattoos to the Arab spring to cheese to the Sexiest Woman Alive.

In the spirit of Ogden Nash to Tom Lehrer, Chris’s verse is usually light. As one British poet wrote, “He knows that the world is parked in a gigantic hand-cart, and that the said cart is pointing hell-wards, but he is happy in himself and not afraid to blow raspberries at its follies.”

In a poem called He’s Not Gonna Take It, published in Light, he wrote about the coronavirus in the voice of the former president:

The press says nasty things about the virus.
Why do they think the buck should stop with me?
My answer to whatever they inquire is
That I don’t take responsibility.
I’m unconcerned about the nation’s health,
Or deaths among your friends and family.
I watch the Dow, I dream about great wealth,
And I take no responsibility.
This is the art I bring to every deal.
Let’s blame the Chinese this time. Don’t blame me.
Whatever pain you suffer, I can’t feel.
I never take responsibility.

(From Pandemic Poetry & Prose, published by the Straw Dog Writers Guild)

Keeping Perspective

Although Chris has lost a third of his liver, it turns out that we all have more of this organ than we need – and it regenerates itself! His liver surgery on February 28 showed that the cancer cells there were “necrotic,” indicating that the chemotherapy had done its job.

On April 10, he started another round of chemotherapy, and will continue with eight rounds of it. “I’ve felt some alienation from my body, and now I’ve struck back by poisoning it,” he said. “Now I want to be back on friendly terms with it again, please.”

His other published cancer poem, in Lighten Up Online, is called Marvel Comics Oncology:

Here’s what chemo should be like,
I decide – lightning should strike
The hospital just as they’re infusing my medication.
Sparks everywhere! Mind-bending disorientation!
My skin glows, say, an argon green or mercury blue
As my body ripples with powers superhuman and new.
Doctors, however, tell me this particular side effect
Is not one I ought to expect.
Disappointing, to be sure,
But I’ll settle for a more mundane cure.

Chris is grateful that the chemical cocktail he’s putting in his body results in fewer side effects than he expected. His hair has not fallen out, and he takes an anti-nausea drug at the first glimmering of queasiness. His biggest side effect has been sensitivity to cold, putting on oven mitts before reaching into the refrigerator.

He’s tried to keep his perspective and not fall into a “Why me, Lord?” attitude. 

“I try to put bad news in perspective,” he said. After all, he has a level of middle-class comfort, excellent doctors, health insurance, a loving family and six grandchildren.

“It’s possible to be funny about just about everything, even though a lot of things are not funny, like having cancer,” he said.