How I Wrote Certain of My Books
I met the poet before he disappeared
The timeline of events doesn’t make sense
I don’t think you are lying but I suspect there are gaps elisions important details you
are not disclosing
You have a way of speaking that doesn’t allow me to ask questions
Are you like this with everyone?
You keep the people who love you most at a distance drawing them in when they talk about themselves yet holding back when they want to know more about you
I met the poet in a writing workshop he offered out of his home
I was one of four students in the class
There was one student who never spoke and never turned in any writing and the poet loved her because the silent student understood that the ultimate form of poetry was silence and we all saw something sublime in her refusal to acknowledge even the most basic forms of communal norms and discourse
Another student was a father of three kids
He owned a small business and was “doing something for himself for a change”
Austerity measures have forced me to abandon aesthetic or narrative unity
I work too much and I don’t have time to write anymore and it limits my creativity and coherence
I cut my budg by twenty-five perc and now I can’t eve finis a
The poet’s preferred way of signing books was Greetings from the land of anti-value
Like all good poets the poet hated his own poetry
I loved his first book but he thought all the poems were cheap imitations of René Char and Gertrude Stein
All poets should hate their own poetry said the poet
You should never be able to look at your own poetry without feeling utterly repulsed
If you are proud of your own poetry or enjoy reading your own poetry then you need to figure out how to write poems that will offend yourself just a little bit more “robustly”
The father of three who was doing something for himself for a change wrote epic poems about his childhood
The poet referred to the father of three’s poems as sociopathic imitations of Frank O’Hara only more interesting
They were horror stories and none of us knew how to respond to them
The poet loved that we didn’t know how to respond to the father of three’s poems
He thought the best response to a poem was to feel like what the fuck did I just read I don’t have a fucking idea what I just read what did I just read do you understand remotely what I just read what the fuck am I reading
And it appeared that the father of three met this standard of what-the-fuckery in his epic poem about a man (now a poet of course) who watched his mother kill his father when he was a child
Did the father of three’s mother actually kill his father?
(Fuck you said the father of three I’m not telling)
Probably not but every once in a while his poems would contain the kind of detail a line from a coroner’s report or a snippet from a newspaper article that led us to think that something along those lines must have happened to him
The father of three was kind and cheerful and always showed up to the workshop with wine or cookies or cake
The poet would give advice like fuck doing new things you’re a writer not an Iphone
You don’t need a constant update
You don’t need to keep changing your algorithm
The other student in the workshop was an attorney and she was about to retire
Her favorite poets were H. D. and Sylvia Plath and she knew almost every detail of Greek and Roman mythology which often served as tropes in her poems
She wrote poems that possessed what the poet once called “a subtle hint of bureaucratic eroticism”
She was terrified of retiring and was “pursuing” poetry because she wanted to make sure she had plenty of activities to keep her mind from atrophying in her retirement and so she designed complex mazes of poems that were impossible to work their ways out of and the poet would ask her questions like
What does this poem hate? What does this poem love? How can you make this poem hate more lovingly and love more hatefully?
I was the other student in the workshop and I hated writing poems that looked like poems so the poet thought I had the right attitude about poetry even if my poems were didactic or bland or facile
It’s not that I’m a bad writer the critic wrote about my last book rather I appear to be writing as a “bad” writer on purpose
I never thought of myself as being a bad writer on purpose but as soon as the critic said this a light bulb went off I must think of myself as being a bad writer on purpose and then everything changed I wrote a bad book on purpose and it was the best book I ever wrote and I won a big prize and I was invited to give a reading at Harvard
I am flexible and I mold my so-called aesthetic choices to satisfy the criteria of the basest members of my audience
The poet didn’t know if being a poet meant being the best/worst version of himself or the best/worst version of someone else
He had a personal joke with himself that his favorite poem was the one about the boot that kept kicking his own teeth
The object of a poem he used to say is to try to put every possible thing into the poem so that the poem is not so much a poem but a container for the entire world and in this way there might eventually be no distinction between living and writing and art and life and art and death and the world as we know it and the world we desire and the world we despise
Americans are obsessed with privacy Is that your chocolate in my peanut butter?
Every line I’ve ever written is a version of another line I’ve ever written and sometimes I write the same lines over and over again to see if they sound different in a different context
As a child I spent fourteen hours a day watching television
Is that your chocolate in my peanut butter?
They say the poet went crazy but it was just back spasms that triggered a series of medications and hallucinations which led to him being admitted into a psychiatric hospital named after a nineteenth century war criminal
Sometimes it’s appropriate to conclude an email with twenty or thirty smiley face emojis and to invite your correspondent to stare dreamily into their creepy emoji eyes as they wink into the fuzzy blue light of the computer
Is a bear catholic?
Does the pope shit in the woods?
He classified my poem as a bad imitation of Vincente Huidobro’s “Monumento al Mar” but in reality it was nothing like Huidobro or perhaps it was a bit like Huidobro if Huidobro wrote about psychoanalysis death metal the television show Twin Peaks a device to detect drugs hidden in the gastrointestinal tracts of border crossers the unspoken relationship between Moses and his more talkative brother Aaron Kafka’s short story “A Report to an Academy” and getting your cell phone stolen while stepping out of the metro in downtown Santiago on your way to lunch at a restaurant which used to be in the house where Vicente Huidobro lived as a child
I recognize that some readers will feel alienated by the reference to a poem they haven’t read by a writer they haven’t read but I’m not choosy or pretentious and mostly I believe that words and names are interchangeable
I like the flow of your poem but I have no idea what any of it actually means
He classified my poem as a bad of imitation of Emily Dickinson’s “Hope Is a Thing with Feathers” yet he told me I did such a good job of writing a bad imitation that he could not forego giving me the highest possible marks on the assignment
A phrase as simple as “I hate your fucking guts” can mean a thousand different things to a thousand different people
It was the end of a long evening and the poet was feeling generous so he gave me a thumb drive with decades worth of unpublished writing a memoir a novel three or four collections of poems and told me to do whatever I want with them
I’m dying frankly and I think it would be great for your career if you put your name on some of the better poems and send them out for publication
According to brittanica.com there is a form of torture called “Crushed by Elephant” which is when a prisoner is placed on the ground in front of an elephant and crushed by it
But I’m warning you if you google “Crushed by Elephant” you will feel as if the entire internet already knows that people have been crushed by elephants for centuries and it might be more beneficial to search for scaphism the ancient practice of a sealing a victim between two boats feeding him milk and honey covering his face with milk and honey so that flies swarm around his face and then as the victim defecates inside the boat flies and maggots “grow up inside” and slowly begin to devour his flesh
Now that the country is “teetering on dictatorship” the poets have come to believe that the subjectivity of subjective experience has a responsibility to be as ugly as the objectivity of objective experience
Awkward sentence bro
Time for another revision
Unreal.