But Call Me Betsy

This is an essay I wrote for the last issue of Philadelphia Stories about poetry.     Here's how you start a poem. First, find a subject matter that’s dear to your heart (and try to work the phrase “dear to your heart“ into the poem if you can). Possible topics include: death of your grandma, death of your cat, death of your friend’s hamster, death of your virginity. Once you have a topic, begin constructing your lines with the intent to confuse the reader. Never use an obvious word when you can choose a mysterious one. For example, instead of writing the word “yellow” substitute “corn,” so that a line that could read “her hair glowed yellow” will instead be more intriguing as “her hair glowed corn.” The whole point of poetry is to prove that you are smarter than your reader; you want the person reading your poem to wish she could call you up and ask, “What did you mean when you wrote ‘with moon so deep the harvest purple’?” ...

Another poem I wrote, inspired by our teacher pleading for us not to turn in poems we wrote in high school. I tried to make the footnotes form another poem. Not sure if it works though. Here it is: What This is Not This is not a poem I wrote in high school with one syllable rhymes to words like heart/tart love/wove soul/pool references to brokeness teddy bears with flat glass eyes dusty teacups that will bide an eternity.* This is not a poem I wrote in college after discovering patchouli and tabouli. Responsible for a plant for the first time I killed it with neglect and wrote a poem comparing the dried, brittle spikes in such phallic terms my face turned red when we workshopped it, the "hard, fecund root withering to a tiny shell of itself..."** This is not a poem I wrote in my twenties for a spoken word contest. I wore a scarf on my head, read a poem about recovery. Later, someone approached me asked me how long I had been in remission. I stutt...

Went to a reading by Stephen Dunn   at the Kelly Writers House for class last night. He's written some amazing poems--one about a man seeing a clown waving to him from the distant treeline, and argument he had with his ex-wife about crows traveling in threes, another about being at a party and going upstairs to hang out with the dogs instead, how at a certain time of day, he's more likely to start misbehaving (4 PM), how it's just luck that he's not considered a criminal, just luck that the fire he started didn't spread or luck that a little girl didn't dart out in front of him in traffic when he was driving a little drunk, poems about desire and "this stupid body," and how on hot days in New York, everyone wants everyone, and then this line from one of the poems he read about a writing workshop where he thought he had a great idea and he read it and "the room got quiet with tolerance." That's what I feared might happen for my worksh...

In this Penn grad class I"m taking, we get to write a short story and then we're going to also be writing poetry. We had our first fiction workshop this week, and it seemed clear that some of the students might be more comfortable in the poetry realm--lots of heavy imagery and repetition; stuff like :"words, words--what are words? Silent words Words as heavy as snow. Wordsmith-ing of the word in the dark scream of the throat." (Reminds me of Woody Allen's Love and Death , where the characters are parodying Russian literature... "Wheat.....wheat.....fields of wheat.....cream of wheat....."). Of course, I am terrified of poetry--I am sure most of mine will be bad. In fact, I know that I write fantastic at bad poetry. Here's a poem I wrote yesterday after eating lunch at Pod with a writer friend of mine: The dumplings sat fat and juicy Like the heart of an over weight midget Yum Maybe I will be okay if we can write narrative poetry ala Billy Colli...

I know that she's been around forever, but I seldom read poetry. I don't even read it in The New Yorker . I don't understand poetry. It seems too hard. I feel dumb when I read it. But then I listened to some of This American Life's holiday podcasts and they had Sharon Olds on to read some of her work. There is a reason she's able to make a living as a poet. Here are some of them for you: "Take the I Out" "I Go Back to May 1937" "My Son the Man" This is the one she read on This American Life that I loved so much. It's called "The Race." I forgot to mention that Lisa Marie and I went to see an open mike night last week. It was set up so that anyone could sign up to tell a story, though it had to be on the subject of holiday spirit, and to stay within a 5 minute time period. Each speaker was then judged by a point system. I wanted to see what it's like in case I ever want to do something like that. We saw five of th...

I somehow accidentally voted for George Bush today. What the hell is going on? The weekend before last, Liz and Luke were up visiting from Park Slope and I told them this story about an email I got wherein the guy used (and misspelled) the word "masterbation" three times in two sentences. I can't remember who said the phrase first, but after I told that story, someone referred to the act of "sadly masturbating." We could not stop laughing. I almost choked on my eggs from hysteria (this is how we are all emotionally about 10 years old). There has also been some debate about what poem I'm going to read at their wedding in July. Liz wants "i carry your heart with me (i carry it in my heart)," a lovely e.e. cummings poem, but it's been in a couple of movies so recently so now we're possibly looking for a different poem. I suggested a couple of others and then wrote one for them that referred to our conversation about sadly masturbating. Here it...