And slightly slant, the final draft of one of my earliest posts here, and published in Ghost Trees:

Learning a Trade

At ten years old, I learned the art
of stripping down a well-worn chair
awaiting its recovery
at Joseph’s Furniture Repair.

I loved to tear off tufts and yards
of braid and fabric, yank out mesh
and tacks, and bare the chairs to bones,
frames my father would refresh.

In my search for hidden treasures,
I’d peel away a Naugahyde,
brocade or satin, rip out springs
and webbing, finding deep inside

old glasses, watches, pencils, coins,
photos, jewels, and wedding bands—
dry remnants of their owners’ lives,
recovered stories in my hands.

First appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly

EPIC POEM

I thought that I would write a poem
... that's filled with great import,
and what you're reading now, I thought,
... would be the epic sort
that fills at least a book or two,
... yet something came to thwart
my best intentions. That is why
... this epic poem's so short.

How Many Poets Does It Take to Screw in a Light Bulb?

Eschew the headlong thrust, but choose the screw,
That subtle swerve that Archimedes knew.
Let there be light by means of deft rotation
And delicately twisted penetration.



Five Feet

Iamb and spondee are trochees
(An anomaly some find amusing),
And anapest scans as a dactyl –
Poetry is perverse and confusing.

Dactyl falls short of dactylic
Eminence, since it lacks the essential
Third syllable. Thus only trochee
Manages to be self-referential.



Ode to My Rhyming Dictionary

Some rhymes are words you don’t hear every day:
This book alerts me that I’d be a curple,
A horse’s hindquarters, were I to say
That no word in the language rhymes with purple;

It sets me straight by showing me that month,
The name we give an interval of time
Of which a day’s about one thirty-oneth,
Can beat the rap of lacking any rhyme;

It gifts me with a golden rhyme for silver,
That precious color of bright drops of dew
Or moonlight glistening on a newborn chilver
Nursed by her likewise silvered mother ewe;

It takes me by the hand and guides me higher,
As to the very summit of the Blorenge,
Bids me survey Welsh landscape and acquire
That rhymester’s Holy Grail, a match for orange.

And then there's Emily's (somewhat) slant critique of Whitman's "Song of Myself":

Emily to Walt

O vatic Walt, you loom so large—
A One-Man multitude—
An Ark—an overflowing Barge
Of Infinitude!

O Walt of whitecaps, Waves of Words—
My Quaint small vessels, tightly
Measured, sail in minor worlds,
But yours—through cyclones—Mighty.

O Skipper Walt! You sing of bathers—
Lovers and beloved—
Frolicking near sandy shores,
All welcomed—none refused.

O Walt, who shouts the Yes of Being
From your Mainmast’s top—
I can’t contain my Querying
Of your—Barbaric—Yawp!

First appeared in Amsterdam Quarterly; later in Ghost Trees

My favorite poem on this subject is an immortal quatrain by
X.J. KENNEDY:

Ars Poetica

The goose that laid the golden eggs
died looking up its crotch
to find out how its sphincter worked.
Would you lay well? Don't watch.

MEASURED THINKING

In prosody a single fact'll
puzzle more than all the rest:
although an anapest's a dactyl,
a dactyl's not an anapest.

But if trochees are trochaic,
an arrangement quite idyllic,
shouldn't spondees be spondaic,
shouldn't dacytls be dactylic?

I'm not trying to be hokey,
but I've always wondered who
named a spondee with a trochee
then a dactyl with one, too?

It's a chaos as majestic
as a cloudbank or a fractyl:
though no dactyl's anapestic
every anapest's a dactyl.

This one is very old – a one-day draft from one of many poem-a-day challenges I've partaken in.

On writing a ghazal

Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever manage to write a ghazal.
Oh I have tried, but what I write is never quite a ghazal.

Perhaps it’s because a part of me thinks
there’s something not quite right about the ghazal

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn't want to criticise –
far be it from me to slight the ghazal,

but it’s just that - how can I put this? – most poems
seem to have a just a little more bite than a ghazal,

And I think it's fair to say that very few forms
put up quite so little fight as a ghazal,

and this repetition thing – I mean, there’s a danger
of just going on all night with a ghazal.

But enough, I’m at risk of sounding like
I’m being impolite about the ghazal.

And let’s focus on the positives here, at least
it looks like this one actually might be a ghazal.

Fingers crossed, I may finally
have done everything right with a ghazal.

And I’m not the sort of person who’d
mess things up just out of spite.

Thanks for starting this very entertaining thread after one of my throw away suggestions Michael C. This is a way better idea than Barbie debate.

Some of the poems on here are not even remotely dreadful and they're more than worthy of their publication credits.

I've got something that's so bad I think it might take a few days for me to pluck up the courage to post it. It's a cringeworthy poem with a cringeworthy title (Anal Cunt) that compares writing to love making and reproduction.

In the meantime, this poem might not immediately strike you as being about poetry writing but it's actually not far off my creative process. I have to be mentally ill to even contemplate writing poetry and then I just get the iguana to write for me (no illicit substances are involved).

A Pet-Induced Psychosis

I once owned a gifted iguana
who could sing "On a Plain" by Nirvana.
He would toot on a flute
and write poems to boot,
in the days when we puffed marijuana.

From the sequence My Sister's Shadow:


My sister gives the clothing she’s outgrown
to me, two years her junior. I accept
her charity resignedly. I own
her boots (still caked with shit in which she stepped),
white blouses for 4-H (with pepper-stains
from sheep who sneezed on her at point-blank range),
her high school gym clothes (bearing the remains
of silkscreened mascots laundered into mange).

My sister’s threadbare hand-me-downs include
her schools (which teem with people she’s impressed).
Although the straitlaced sonnet was eschewed
as “too constricting,” scorned as “overdressed,”
and mothballed as “antique” ere I was born,
at least it’s something Tammy’s never worn.


The whole sequence is self-congratulation for what a brave and noble and unique thing I thought I was doing by becoming a sonnet-writing nerd, instead of another math-and-science nerd like Tammy, as everyone expected. Imagine my disappointment when I found out formalism wasn't quite as dead as my high school teachers had led me to believe.

Shit happens. Everybody gets their share;
the sorry stuff doesn’t discriminate –
it hits the fan and then it’s everywhere.
Nobody ducks until it’s far too late.
A canny lass can never have too many
plans for confronting an emergency.
A sonnet is as good a way as any.
It did for Shagsberg; it’ll do for me.
So sock it to me, Sunshine. I can take it.
I’ll dredge the sludge for something new to say.
I’ll squeeze the mental Plasticine and make it
sing itself. Waste not, want not. That’s the way
Creative Writers learn to deal with it.
This is the way a poet handles shit.