by Nathan Moore and Dana Guthrie Martin

My fleeting Lesbians,
passive, delicate. My girls
come quickly; move through me
and into my sinus passages.
Queue up your daring digital appetites.
Eat acrid soil, incite remorse.
You come desiring homes on the Internet.
With what omniscient care you lube your cars,
jets of oil lacing your doldrums.
Acquiesce to the ardor of gravity’s tomb?
Better to hang like a possum under a branch:
to levitate like animals — reassure us!

* * *
Process Notes

This poem was inspired by Nathan’s inspired poem bullshit for Poetry x 12. You can find that poem bullshit here. You can find the piece by Catullus in Latin here.

Add “huzzah” to any sentence to get to 17 syllables.

Note: This list is now closed. Also, despite what HTML Giant says, I did not write the first 10 bullshit items on this bullshit list. The entire bullshit list is collaborative, as stated in my introductory bullshit below.
* * *

I’d like to see a list of at least 10 reasons poetry is bullshit. Let’s do this. Don’t make me compose the list alone. Leave the reason or reasons you think poetry is bullshit in the comments section for this post. You don’t have to be a poet to leave a reason — in fact, it’s probably better if you aren’t a poet. Poets need to hear from you on this matter.

I will compile the list of reasons below. Yours will be included if it’s a reason you think poetry is bullshit. If you leave a comment defending poetry — which is fine — it won’t be added to the list. Because that’s not what the list is. Maybe I will post a list in a few days about why poetry is not bullshit, but today we’re focusing on why it is.

(Yes. I fully expect to get zero comments on this post, since it’s negative and not upbeat and all, but I do want to extend the opportunity to compose this list collaboratively. C’mon. We can make this fun!)

1. Because too many people use experimentalism as a way to dodge privilege and the hard work of re-examining and challenging cultural norms all while claiming outsider status for themselves.
2. Because poets squabble over and fight for outsider status as a symbol of, I don’t know, authenticity? Value? while ignoring the work of people who can’t or don’t network (well).
3. Because the poet is like the guest at a party who is saying really interesting things (and sometimes not very interesting things) long into the night, only to look up and see that everyone is gone — that they’ve been gone for hours. We’re talking to an empty room. We respond to the emptiness by continuing to talk. Sometimes, nobody but us even shows up for the party in the first place. We fiddle with the fancy lettuces, with the corkscrew. We wait. We talk to ourselves. Poets are always waiting.
4. Because most poems seem to be about small things. A minute and individualized experience is really basically of no value to anyone who doesn’t know the person who had that experience. I can tell you “My grandmother burned her wrist on a hot muffin tin” all day but if you don’t have some vested interest in me or my grandmother or muffins, WHY THE FUCK would you care?
5. Publishing in journals is bullshit because no one reads journals. Why would I want to give someone EXCLUSIVE rights to my work if only thirty people will even give it more than a cursory glance?
6. Because television is shiny.
7. Because pop music does what poems try to do — perhaps less authentically and way less engaging, but just as Big Mac will always fill your belly a pop song will always give you that cheap manufactured emotional “pop” moment without the need of buying or (god forbid) reading poems. Instead of reading “Leaves of Grass,” just go listen to Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys.
8. A big reason why poetry is bullshit is because people like Dana who devote a big portion of their thought life to poetry often complain that it is, in fact, bullshit. Poetry is as bad for a day’s work as Facebook.
9. Can’t get the news from it, can you?
10. Because everyone knows the song “Amazing Grace.”
11. Because I bought six albums, legally, for like 19 bucks yesterday at the record store. Matthew Dickman’s ridiculous, flawed, overhyped, self-absorbed bullshit-opus “All American Poem” cost me the same thing. One shitty book versus six great albums I’ll get hours of enjoyment from. BULLSHIT. Plus when I bought the Dickman I had to put up with the girl at the “indie bookstore” flirting with me with her stupid accessories. Bullshit.
12. Because the only people who regularly read poetry are people who are in love with poets. This has been proven. See “The Ouroboros And Dickinson: Self-consumption in verse,” Redwood et al.
13. Because I can’t stop reading it.
14. Because it isn’t my poetry.
15. Poetry is bullshit because women’s poetry continues to be pathologized and feminized. It continues to be called “women’s poetry” instead of poetry. And that’s bullshit.
16. Poetry is bullshit because I always hate what I wrote last week.
17. Because a blog post I spent 15 minutes on gets more readers than a poem I’ve fretted over for months.
18. Because Joyce did everything poets today are supposedly trying to do and did it in prose.
19. Because poems about big things and big ideas habitually overreach.
20. Because Ezra Pound was a fascist.
21. Because no one buys your book.
22. Because it is safe and praiseworthy to write essays about the need for negative reviews instead of writing negative reviews.
23. Because the party food isn’t filling and it’s hopeless if you’re on a special diet.
24. Because the wine isn’t very good anyway, since the poet spent all their money on fancy paper for chapbook covers.
25. Poetry is bullshit because I know, I just KNOW, that I will be reading on blogs or via references on Facebook or at open mikes or in some newsletter … poems about wolf moon or perigee moon or perigee wolf moon or wolf perigee moon and the mood of the poet during aforementioned wolf perigee moon. Soon, very soon.
26. The conventions and rules of poetry require a steeper learning curve for many people than other forms of art, which are accessible even for “outsiders.” When familiarity with the conventions are necessary for the most basic-level engagement, many people are going to be left out of the conversation. … I like some poetry, typically the poetry that is understandable to outsiders without having to know the stylistic ins-and-outs. I don’t have to know what stippling is to be able to enjoy an ink drawing that uses it. I do have to know poetic conventions to be able to understand most poems that make heavy use of them.  (signed, a non-poet)
27. Because everyone above the age of 9, and most people ages 6 – 9, and quite a few kiddos younger than 6 are phonies, so they are quite prone to writing bullshit. (The source is corrupted.)
28. Because there is such a thing as stupid questions, and lots of poems spend their time asking stupid questions.
29. Because lots of poems don’t even stop to ask questions.
30. Because good poetry requires reading and living precede the writing, and we are often too lazy or too scared for the first two activities.
31. Poetry is the natural end-product of the consuming, masticating, catalyzing, digesting and excreting that occurs in fields, in stables, in mouths, in alimentary canals, in bowels of beasts, in pastures around the world.
32. And what everyone else said.
33. Poetry is bullshit because, try as I might, I will never write a poem that touches the heart as much as those ASPCA ads with the sad dog.
34. BECAUSE syllables are air.
35. Because all the good poets are dead.
36. Because even if you’re really lucky and successful as an American poet, you end up landing a professorial gig where colleagues are territorial and jealous malcontents who hate contemporary poetry even more than you do, who suspect you are an intellectual fraud, and who are best buddies with the dean and so you’re totally screwed whenever you want a small crumb of funding for your own poetry students who so desperately want to have your job or just to be published in some nice little magazine so that they can become famous and have their work taught by burned-out and underpaid adjuncts teaching at a community college in Dog Bite, Montana.
37. Poetry is bullshit b/c Roby can make a poem out of my words and I cannot.
38. Poetry is bullshit because we are witnessing the cult of the short poem, the individual poem, the 40-lines-or-less poem — thanks in large part to and perpetuated by poetry journals, which don’t have the real estate to devote to longer work or to more than one or two or three poems by an individual poet. (And don’t even get me started on literature anthologies that include entire novels but only a handful of poems by any given poet.) We want these short, knock-you-out poems to help us transcend, and we want to achieve that transcendence in the shortest possible number of lines. These poems are the equivalent of Transcendental Meditation ™, which promises transcendence in only 30 minutes a day, without the fuss and hassle of actually doing the work of meditating and training the mind over longer periods of time. But we don’t transcend. We only get the feeling of transcending. And the feeling of the thing is not the thing itself. Almost all of what we label as “transcendence” is bullshit, and that includes what we label as “transcendent” in poetry.
39. Poetry is bullshit b/c poems are supposed to be believable and no one would believe a poem about a fancy lettuce fort in Dog Bite, Montana, where feelings of transcendence are sorted in a discard pile far away from actual moments of transcendence, which we sort into suits and hold like fans in our hands. Until someone gets enough hearts and wins the round, forcing everyone else in the circle to remove an item of clothing. Such a poem would certainly go beyond 40 lines to a still predictable end in which everyone was naked and frozen to death.
40. Because poetry does not get naked often enough.
41. Poetry is bullshit because we all know that it’s bullshit but we keep cooking it up, eating it, and feeding it to each other, all the while bragging (or pretending to be modest) about each step of the process.
42. Because reading poetry at the bar keeps the seats next to you empty and your glass full.
43. Poetry is bullshit b/c there’s no magic bullet-train to success town. How can we fight the werewolves beneath the full perigree moon without magic bullets?
44. For every poet hiding behind bullshit experimentalism there’s another poet hiding behind quietist mainstream bullshit sentimentalism.
45. Because poetry is dead and we’re all better off for it.
46. “If you want to feel, go to the movies.” (I wish I had said that but was some bullshit poet whose name I can’t remember.)
47. Because we’ve completely forgotten about the audience.
48. Because we take ourselves and our  ridiculous art form way too seriously.
49. Because everyone of us is doing it for the wrong reasons most of the time.
50. Because we want to be loved, but don’t want to have to love others.
51. Because we’ve learned too many tricks and shortcuts.
52. Because once a poet becomes competent, it’s easier and easier for them to remove themselves from authenticity.
53. Because a bunch of hipster poets are going to roll their eyes at me because I just used the word, “authenticity”. (Sorry, I don’t have a better one right now).
54. Because we’re cynical.
55. Because don’t even know anymore who we’re trying to reach, or why, or what it is inside of us we’re trying to heal or connect to something. We’re completely exiled from ourselves, and most of the time poetry is only a tool for making it worse; for further deepening our own sense of isolation and alienation.
56. Because we’re too far too much in our heads.
57. Because we think we’re tragic and unique.
58. Because we’re lost of our sense of humor.
59. Because no one will give a medal for what we think of as all of our hard work.
60. When people say they want to take action by writing a poem, it’s one of the most misguided and often bullshittiest things ever, really. If you want to take action, take action. If you want to write a poem, write a poem. But don’t confuse the two, especially when the poem you are writing about Haiti (or global warming or poverty or whatever) will most likely reach only a handful of people, max. Actually doing something for whatever you cause you care about is acting on that cause’s behalf. Even opening your wallet is more helpful than opening your journal. So act – and write your poem. But don’t write your poem instead of acting.
61. Poetry is bullshit because of the artificial distinction we maintain between Poetry and prose.
62. Poetry is bullshit because people will commend fine prose by calling it poetry, but those same people will never read Poetry.
63. Poetry is bullshit because if you remove the line breaks from an unrhymed sonnet people will think it’s the weather report.
64. Poetry is bullshit because the community is divided into the incestuous & pretentious academics and the narcissistic whiners who point to their non-communicative or overtly cliched, angst-ridden doggerel as proof of their authenticity as poets.
65. Poetry is bullshit because too many people would read Dana’s “So act — and write your poem. But don’t write your poem instead of acting” and think that is a command to show up at a reading in a beret and read their poem with every line ending with an upward inflection.
66. Because women who write outside of certain bounds, especially without “enough” emotion, aren’t allowed to be women poets.
67. Because too many people think there’s only one tradition and others see a few branches rather than totally different sets of origins.
68. Because poets need to drink before using a microphone.
69. Because poets need to use a microphone even in hole-in-the-wall bookshops.
70. Because reading this list gives me ideas for poems.
71. Because reading this list gives Erich ideas for poems.
72. Oh, god. I have a heron poem. And a grandma poem. And a poem with eggs and lost children … It’s bullshit because the true metaphors have been used up and the new ones are artifice.
73. Because it leads you to write with multiple meanings when people only want none.
74. Because all this writing is making my ass larger and my pocketbook smaller.
75. Poetry is bullshit in the way, let’s say, Hungarian is bullshit. If you don’t speak the language, you can feel cut out of the conversation. But it only becomes bullshit if those fluent in Hungarian, and poetry, mock you when you try to learn the language. So I guess that’s like saying, “Snobbery is bullshit, not poetry.”
76. You have to (HAVE TO) be more than a little delirious and crazy to want to spend your time sweating blood over some words, and how they work together and what they say, when you could be doing something USEFUL, like … well, dusting, or fixing the cupboard door, or cleaning the garage. I mean, REALLY.
77. Poetry is bullshit when it’s turned into a religion and poets become priests.
78. Poetry is bullshit when poems have to be about something.
79. Poetry is bullshit when it becomes a magic show based on misguided notions of revelation.
80. Poetry is bullshit but I’m obsessed with it. I’m obsessed with bullshit.
81. I like poetry, and believe it is an important art form.  But one of the reasons I don’t participate that much in poetry sites is that it becomes a bit insular — just like other niche sites — and I don’t feel that you really want to read shitty poems. Which is OK. Who does? One of the things I like about blogging is the back and forth interaction between the talented writers who clearly know how to write well and the bloggers who are just doing it for their families, or self-therapy. It is very democratic in many ways. At times, the posts of the regular non-writer are way more interesting than the well-constructed “literary” posts of the better writers. Words are essential to a writer, but so is heart, and just because someone puts together words cleverly doesn’t mean they connect with the universal themes that affect everyone. I would much rather read a clumsy plot post about a mother’s fear about sending her child to school for the first time than a poem about a chair. I know this is not a professional response, but so be it. I do like poetry. I’m just not sure I want to hang around with poets. Or most of them don’t really want to hang around with me. I think in past generations, poets liked to flirt with the non-poets more.
82. I have a tattoo of a heron. Egret actually. Something very bullshit about those crooked necks.
83. I will read any heron poem, even if it’s bullshit.
84. Here’s another thought I had as I was working on a column today about Rosalia de Castro: Poetry is bullshit because language is political.
85. When it’s hiding behind pretty words or jarring images it’s bullshit. Poetry has pretty words … and jarring images SOMETIMES. But trickery is trickery and truth is truth. Poetry is not dressing up and hoping to be picked. Poetry is standing naked, and making no jokes gestures or excuses.
86. Because the end turns out to be where I started and no one wants to get to here.
87. Because poets are expected to give over their work for free. That’s bullshit.
88. It’s bullshit that most people don’t want poems even when they are made available for free.
89. Because the poem that doesn’t provide insights is often considered a failure.
90. Because poetry is a pyramid scheme.
91. And poetry is bullshit because we (people with enough money to feed & cover ourselves, living in a powerful industrialized society) are spoiled children.
92. Poetry is bullshit because we do not, I repeat, we do not need one more poem about Persephone or one more poem that is enamored with irony or one more ekphrastic poem that is only a description of the art. However, the moon is another story — without it or the sun, we’d just be flailing around in the dark.
93. Because Poetry Magazine exists at all.
94. Poetry is bullshit because when it’s sweet it’s indigestible.
95. Because everybody is at it, but no one is buying it.
96. Because however I rearrange the words and the lines there is always one syllable too many and when there isn’t the poem is asanine.
97. Poetry is bullshit because your dreams just aren’t that interesting to other people. It doesn’t matter how many precious moments you find in them to tie to a childhood memory. The unanchored rest isn’t surreal, it’s just self-indulgent.
98. Poetry is bullshit because analysis like this is bullshit. A single poem can contain slices of crimson colored hematite and Cadillacs and the artist Pietro Torrigiano and whenever a poem like this has a striking degree of harmonious dissimilitude, some human reader comes along in a wool cardigan and preaches as to why it works or how it doesn’t based upon his/her expectations. Poems can be perfect until a person (who is bullshit) comes along and leaves their grubby feces-stained fingerprints all over the page where the poem lives. To summarize, poetry is bullshit because people are bullshit.
99. Line / breaks.
100. because no catbox is deep enough to cover the over-intellectualized, dissociative commentary of “poets” who drop their ars poetica across the interwebs.
101. Because poets are precisely the type of people who worry about whether poetry is bullshit. As opposed to, say, football players. Or milliners. Or oenophiles. (I mean, get drunk already!)
102. Because bursting into song and dancing around crooning “singin in the rain / I’m just singin in the rain” is bullshit. Being moved, even for no reason at all, to do something like dance, or paint or write something down, is total bullshit. All of that representation of being overcome by feeling and bursting out onto the streets, dancing while kevin bacon sings “Footloose” just reminds us that, since we don’t do that, and since no one else we know does that, well, it must be bullshit. Certainly not authentic. It is bullshit. Isn’t it?
103. Because it’s just a way to meet poets, fuck them and marry them. I should know.
104. Because there aren’t any sixteen-year-old kids out there today, riding for an hour to school past rows of citrus trees, reading this weird squib called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and saying, “Yes I have known them all too” in innocent arrogance. Or clutching to their hearts their misreadings of Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.” Or saying “fuck yeah!” when reading a sonnet by Edna St. Vincent Millay. Or having their eyes opened to a new and unfamiliar world (or even discovering someone who fucking finally speaks their world) by the likes of Jimmy Santiago Baca, Jim Carroll, Hannah Weiner, Frank O’Hara or Larry Eigner. Or even reading C.A. Conrad’s Book of frank (for a class no less) and realizing, Hey I didn’t know you could do that. I kind of like that. Actually, I really like it. Cuz it’s all total bullshit man.
105. Because when you ask someone, anyone, what is their favorite poem, they always have one and can tell you about it, and will even sometimes read it to you from some tattered scrap folded into their wallets. Something like that is just unspeakable bullshit.
106. Because there aren’t any poets these days who are household names. I mean, everyone knows who Lady Gaga is. At one time mostly everyone knew who Robert Frost was. Name one contemporary poet who is a household name, who you could walk into anybody’s house and say their name and everyone would go, I know who that is! This is the fault of poetry and poets. People like Bobby Frost & e.e. cummings — they knew how to keep up with the times.
107. Because poets are so fucking egotistical. I mean, artists are very humble people. So are musicians and singers. And fashion designers. And actors. Fuckin’ salt of the earth, those people. But not them shitty, full-of-emselves poets. They make me want to gag.
108. Because I can’t just sit down and read a poem. You know, I can just sit down and read a novel (like Jane Austen. I love her. And stephen king. And that travelling pants sisterhood book. Maybe not some of those novels I had to read in English class. Those were hard and I couldn’t just sit down and read them. They weren’t as straightforward, so i didn’t like them). I can listen to lots of music without having to know anything about it or think about it (although I have to admit, I don’t really get or much like that classical stuff. Except for the music in Fantasia – I just love that!). I don’t have to know anything about art to enjoy a painting. I mean, just look at that water lily painting by Monet or one of Van Gogh’s portraits (they just get me, right here). But, I don’t like those paintings that are just swipes of color on a canvas or that don’t even cover the whole fucking canvas. I mean, what is that really? Bullshit. Oh. Wait. Um. I mean … well, poetry’s bullshit. I should be able to just sit down and read it and it should be straightforward like my favorite movie or my favorite song. Poetry is bullshit.
109. Poetry is bullshit because it forgot to be communication.
110. Poetry is bullshit because to get a book published is to become a contestant.
111. Poetry is bullshit because the Associated Writing Programs are bullshit. The teachers there push their own agendas, which are merely the testimonies of their relationships with poems. The teachers claim, on behalf of their employers, that they can teach their students how to write poems, while often neglecting to teach them how to read or consider poems except in light of the poems they are teaching them to write. We all can introduce someone else to the poems that we know, and it makes particularly good business sense to introduce the ones that have helped to pay the rent. But everyone knows that you really can’t teach someone to read or write a poem, which sucks shit. If you could, you would show them how to look at a poem with their ears and listen to it silently and out loud with their eyes. Once they were pretty good at this, they would realize that the apprehension of even a “mediocre” poem would be like seeing the entire world from multiple vantage points all at once, and that this view you can feel in your gut, among other places, would change when you came back to the poem in a couple of years; and they would be forced to internalize this knowledge because to people this all sounds like bullshit. Also, once she/he learned how to get out of the way of normal human looking and listening in order to read a poem, and after 10 years or so of trying to bullshit themselves and others on the page and on stage, if he/she were still alive, relatively healthy and could smell that original poems were coming, believed that poems were worth the time and energy to make (which is bullshit), as opposed to just chewing on all the thousands of perfectly decent poems that people gave their miserable lives to pull out of a bull’s ass, they too might be able to produce a poem that a couple of people could read but probably wouldn’t. But you see, poems do all the teaching, and their agendas, if they had them, aren’t very practical or dependent upon people, which as far as most hungry and stupid people are concerned is utter bullshit.
112. I think bullshit in poetry is fine. We need blarney. We need to French kiss the blarney stone. The world needs its bulls. It needs its shit. Take the shit out of poetry and nothing will grow in it. Resist the puritan impulse to clean every thing, to get out the Lysol. Little creatures that live around your eyes are shitting right now.
113. Poetry is bullshit, ’cause
     it takes the language as it was
     and crumples it, all fold and dent
     to hide just what the poet meant.
     Poetry is bullshit, since
     the other poets groan and wince
     and say the work is twee, like elves;
     and wish they’d written it themselves.
     Poetry is bullshit, for
     all poets really know the score
     and criticize with gleeful smirk,
     condemned to read each others’ work.
114. Poetry is bullshit because we think there’s supposed to be air around our words rather than conversation.
115. Narrative arcs are bullshit. OK, I’ve had some wine. I’ll stop adding to the list now.
116. Poetry is bullshit because we think there’s supposed to be conversation around our words rather than air. OK, really stopping now. For real.
117. Poetry is bullshit because it too makes a wonderful fertilizer, having the advantage, depending on ink and paper, of adding a balanced set of nutrients to your soil. Composted poetry contains Nitrogen, Phosphorous, Potassium, trace nutrients and soil microorganism stimulants. Poetry, depending on the amount of organic matter per line, can add bulk and structure to your soil that increases water holding capacity. In short, poetry is as highly recommended way to improve your vegetable garden or simply to add luster to your flower
     bed.
118. Poetry is bullshit because I can’t stop writing it. I mean seriously, that’s some bullshit right there.
119. Apart from that poetry is bullshit because it’s always breaking my heart. That poetry, getting drunk and into fights and coming home stinking of sweat and spit and alcohol. Then it gets into bed with me and we do have sex and in the morning I roll over and some hair falls across poetry’s face and I know I’m in love with a ridiculous abomination.
120. Poetry is a little bit bullshit because everything is a little bit bullshit.

It’s the end of January. Time to wrap up my January Poetry x 12 reading experience. But before I do so, in case you don’t know what Poetry x 12 is, take a look at this post, which contains all the pertinent details.

In short, Poetry x 12 is a yearlong poetry-reading challenge with a different theme each month. Participants read one book per month (or more if they feel ambitious) that fits the month’s theme. Some participants have chosen to write essays, reviews and poetry responses as well as reading their selections, and that’s fantastic. In my sideblog, I’ve linked to the January responses I’ve seen so far.

(If you’ve written a response and I haven’t seen it, leave a comment on this post or email me at mygorgeoussomewhere (at) gmail (dot) com. And if you want to participate, you can join in anytime. Send me an email and let me know so I can add you to the project’s blogroll. You can also request the blogroll code if you want to display the participant list on your site. The blogroll will be updated automatically to include new participants.)

January’s theme for Poetry x 12 was to read a collection published the year we were born. I was having a hard time deciding what to select. Then Nathan Moore and I were talking about Poetry x 12 one evening, and he said he was going to read The Book of Nightmares, by Galway Kinnell. He thought it was published in 1969, the year he was born. I had the book on my shelf but hadn’t read it, so I pulled it down and found the copyright date. 1971!!! I exclaimed, with not one or two but three exclamation points, as if this were some kind of victory — being able to snatch the poetry collection my dear friend wanted to read right out from under him because it was published the year I was born, not the year he was born.

It wasn’t my most shining moment. But we do what we have to do where poetry challenges are concerned. A few days later, I managed to spill an entire container of water on my copy of The Book of Nightmares, which made me sad. This is what you get, I thought, for showing such delight in the face of Nathan’s palpable loss.

Like many participants in Poetry x 12, I wanted to not only read a collection each month but also discuss it in some way. However, I could tell early on that The Book of Nightmares would be a difficult collection for me to talk about, mostly because it’s so engrossing that the work became an experience, a whole, something I could not — or rather, did not feel inclined to — pull apart and analyze in any systematic (or even haphazard) manner.

Instead, I decided to write a series of poems in response to my reading of Kinnell’s work as I made my way through the collection. These weren’t imitation poems by any means. But some aspects from Kinnell’s collection are present: themes, imagery, a line here and there. I wasn’t trying to comment on the collection, exactly. And I wasn’t trying to imitate the tone, exactly. Rather, I used the work as a way of both being inside and outside his collection, of entering into and resisting its tone. My series has a different voice, too, a different kind of speaker than Kinnell’s. At times my speaker seems to be in conversation with Kinnell’s speaker, but I don’t feel equipped to offer much insight about that, being close to the writing, as I am, as its writer.

Over the past few weeks, I have written my response poem in sections. Each section up until the middle of the series follows the Fibonacci sequence. (A friend recently gave me a copy of Inger Christensen’s Alphabet, and I wanted to play with that form because, for once, I had seen it employed in a manner that didn’t seem hokey.) At the midway point, I reversed the sequence until the poem disappeared.

Because I have been more interested in long poems lately than shorter ones — a change I attribute to my collaborative work with Nathan — writing sections of increasing length, and writing more sections than I felt comfortable writing, was a challenge I welcomed. I pushed each increasingly lengthy section until I felt I had nothing left to write, which was only the midway point. Then I allowed myself a long exhale for the second half of the poem, wherein I was challenged to write progressively shorter and shorter sections.

If you want to read the piece in its entirety, I’ve uploaded it to a private page and would be happy to send you a link. Otherwise, you can find it piecemeal here on the site by clicking here and then following the trail back to the first piece. But act fast — I don’t know how much longer I will keep the series up on the site or on my private page.

Oopsie! The poem seems to have disappeared. What??? You had your chance to read it. But no worries – the piece is going to be published sometime soonish by Slack Buddha Press, so you can see it then.

Another weekend: I play a cantata and wait for you to call.

Step 1
First, realize that people can tell when they are about to write a poem. There is a distinct difference between feeling like writing a poem and knowing you are about to write one. Learn to tell the difference between the two states. When you are about to write a poem, your mouth will produce a lot of saliva and you will feel an unusual heaviness in your throat.

Step 2
Place your head over your writing table. Try not to tilt your head forward. Keeping your head up will make it easier on your chest when the poetry-writing begins.

Step 3
Hold your nose shut with your index finger and thumb to prevent words coming out of your nose. If this does happen, the words will burn and leave an unpleasant smell in your nostrils for a long time.

Step 4
Watch how long you remain at the table. If you keep trying to write a poem but nothing comes out other than a few dry phrases, take several deep breaths. Step away from the table if needed, but don’t stray too far — the poem could spew forth all at once at any moment.

Step 5
Avoid drinking or eating anything directly after writing a poem. You don’t want to irritate your body any more. After a few minutes, try sipping water slowly — don’t gulp it down. Lay off any stronger beverages or food for a few hours, even if you feel fine.

Step 6
Attempt to get rid of that telltale writing aftermath as soon as possible. You may want to wash your writing table off more than once if you don’t want to see or smell the mess.

Step 7
Use mouthwash or toothpaste to get the last traces of words out of your mouth. Words can sometimes contain impurities that can get trapped in your teeth during the process of writing a poem.

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Process Notes

This is a “found” poem, which I am submitting to Nathan Moore’s Found Poetry group over at Read Write Poem. I took the steps from wikihow’s “How to Vomit Without Making a Mess” entry and modified it a bit, obviously.

Even what we slough off we still live with, until we vacuum it up.

At beauty school, one training head looks like Jesus, another like Cher.

Four hours after the training session, I’m still wearing my nametag.

Now I only think of Kansas City when I hear “Kansas City.”

(Share your American Sentence at Read Write Poem.)