Notes On Poetry

I'm less interested in the problems you have with grammar than with the problems you have with zippers.

Tell me about the last time you did or did not touch a crotch.

Don't tell me about your hesitant nature when it comes to revision in a poem that you undoubtedly revised.

I love doubt.

Don't talk about layers of artifice.  If every movie acknowledged its movieness, every movie would be closer to amateur porn and less close to this:

How am I supposed to believe you if you don't believe in believing.

If you don't have emotion in your writing, I don't have emotion in my reading of your writing.

Images are good.  Use those.

But if they don't add up to a larger, more important, thing you might as well say "fuck" fifty times in a row.

Don't forget to scan that shit.

Fuck eight times per line, maybe ten.

Don't use your poetry voice when reading poems.  Use your I'm-a-human-being voice.

It's ok to use your poetry voice when you read poems to yourself that other people wrote.

If that makes them sound better to you.

It's ok to hate poems by other people.

It's ok to hate other people by poems.

If you feel you have to tell me what your poem is about before you read your poem, I fucking hate your idea of poethood.  You should never have anymore poems.

I'd rather drown in your shit than have you tell me I'm about to swim in it.