« Odd Morning | Main | Installment #212 in Scoplaw’s Continuing “Here’s What New England is Really Like” Series »


Brian Campbell

You absorptives just don't get it! We anti-absorptives aren't interested in "real people", "trapped in bad situations", in the "human drama", all that cloying claptrap! We're interested in employing our vocabulary to jiggle with your synapses and make you see, hear, feel in a new way! And if you can't appreciate what we're doing, to hell with you! At the same time, you really ought to respect us, esteem us, and in the end, applaud us, because we're really cool. We're hip to what you're doing even if you're not hip to us, in that way we're truly superior. So come on board and join us, we're "it" and we want you to be "with it" too, which is, of course, what we're doing. It's all for the good of poetry, right? It's all in the name of keeping it contemporary, right? What's that expression on your face?! OK! Stay in the dark if you want! Shut up!

;-)! (P.S. I like your description of notions of the "Reader".)


OK,OK, I give up!

The $25 membership check is in the mail - but I want that decoder ring in that promised 3 week time frame.


Ever notice how much easier it is to write about what we think poetry should be than to write poetry the way we think it should be written?


I'm afraid I'm not much good at theory, either the reading or the writing. It bores me quickly. I figure if I don't enjoy the source material (or at least get something out of it) then the debate is that much less enticing. I read a lot of poetry but my method is scattershot. A lot of anthologies, a few literary magazines, always got at least one individual's collection going. And I read science books and novels and whatever strikes my fancy.

And I write poems. The poems are whatever they are. I've learned from everybody I've read, whether John Ashbery or Alan Catlin. Or the newspaper or the people I work with or the noise in the street.

People never read much poetry. That's okay. It's for people who feel a lot. It's an intensity. Whether that's broken language or broken hearts. I write my poems for God, I guess, which is another way of saying nobody reads them. God is as indifferent to my poems as he is to any other suffering. But, as the Buddhists say, it's all suffering anyway.

The comments to this entry are closed.

My Book

  • Ice Sculpture of Mermaid with Cigar

    Icecoversmall Is now available at Amazon

    You can also read about it