Everyone is a poet

I don’t make the rules…

Also, w/r/t enjoying poetry - maybe NO ONE likes your poetry. Is that a goal of yours? If you think art is a conversation between the piece and the audience and you can’t figure out how to get your audience to participate in the conversation you’ve started, then what? Is it someone’s fault? Was the audience you tried to engage with a full subway car of people just trying to go to work? Maybe I need to make a flow chart…

When I was in school for poetry I wanted my thesis advisor to just tell me how to be a good poet already. Sometimes he had real advice “try to avoid cutesy-isms” “if you are going to do an end rhyme, make it really good” “stop splitting your infinitives.” But even if he gave me a million of these very specific and not-always-true commands and I followed all of them, would the resulting poem be enjoyable to anyone? He said “you NEED to read Michael McClure” and I did and waited to feel transformed like when I thought I smoked weed in high school and it was just tobacco and I was sitting on the couch and kept waiting to feel high and it never happened.

I think the real secret to writing is just reading stuff and writing stuff and talking to people about it. Be open to astonishment but have a tether to critical thought. Challenge yourself but be kind to yourself. Follow your bliss but try new things. Wait a couple decades and do McClure/weed again.

(I always worry a better poet than me, one whom I really respect, will read stuff like this and just shake their head: “Poor dummy doesn’t know how dum they are. He will never know the TRUE SECRETS of making good poems.” Well you can keep your secrets, hypothetical poet whom I love!)

It’s all too messy to have IKEA instructions for poetry. But revel in the mess! Wallow with us you hot pigs! There’s some good shit somewhere in this mud.