readers

shouldn't have to know a danged thang about poetry. They aren't the ones who have to open themselves to poetry. It's our job to lure them in and present an engaging and beautiful world they can recognize at once. Granted, they don't know what's poetry any more thanks to a lot of masquerading out there lurking in academic chapbooks, and the willful sabotage of post structuralists farting up faculty lounges from coast to coast. I believe the problem began with TS Eliot telling his students to deliberately fight the natural flow of meter. Yes, and who reads him now, save the occasional, rebellious college academic for whom cleverness is everything?

A poem is like a flower. It has to open itself up in order to live. It has to have that petaled symmetry and structure and say what it means to say with utmost clarity so no one can mistake it for the abounding thorns and briars that call themselves poetry: "Yes, by all means step over here. Oh, you don't see that I'm a brilliant, clever poem? You don't GET me? You must be stupid!"

And that is how they stick you as you turn away. I have a good little library of chapbooks by 'poets,' but I would no more call them poets than call them peach pudding. A couple of decades ago I hosted a poetry reading where one poet's rhyming verse was hooted down by the mob. Technically, he had a few problems. However, the bigger problem is that he wrote an unforgettable poem: "When McLad was a lad, he was oftentimes sad," it begins. The rest wrote in the conventional ironic manner of so much that is sludge to me. I can't remember any of it. But you should have seen them gang up on this guy after I put his reading on tape. Can't have that. But you see, he alone had written a poem.