I don't know which I hate more: The storytelling shows that sounds like poetry slams, or the poetry slams that sound like storytelling shows.

There are people who talk about being poets and wanting to be involved with poetry - wanting to make something out of their poetry, wanting their poetry to take them places, or to transport others - who don't participate in the really simple, right-now kind of stuff. Then, when opportunities come along and they aren't offered or asked or they don't ( Read more... )

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Of course, there are plenty of examples of people who only use the strong syllable count and use as many unstressed syllables as they want, within reason. It's a choice, but I'm a firm believer of educated choices, not I-can't-do-that-choices.

There isn't a poem more powerful, economical or life-altering than the one line a person can hear from another - "I love you" - and knows, for the first time, its truth. We're all really just trying to beat that line.

Get used to getting used. I'd make a chart graphing the ratio of people I hear from prior to being able to do things for their art against its inverse, but it would make us both cry.

People who pop into your life ONLY to criticize are people you don't need. Did they ever respond to any of your good news? Did they ever spend a dime on your art? Ever show up at one of your shows? No? But they have time and energy to criticize when you share shit? That's not Roger Ebert, yo. That's a motherfucker with too much opinion on their

Of course, we should always remember the first rule in art: Know the rules before you break the rules. I'll add that knowing the rules don't mean "knowing they exist". It means "having actually done work using the rules to see why the rules exist, then making informed decisions to the contrary when it suits your purpose."

They think that if you give them what they want, their success is going to somehow trickle down to other poets, so we should defer to them, support them, even when they shit don't ring true. They're like the Big Business Republicans of poetry, except they ain't big, they got no business, and not enough people support their shit to make them a

(From a writing challenge on Oct. 29, 2012 to myself: Post a series of poems of no more than 4 lines in length whose theme is the sound in old video games (the music, the noises, the bleeps). Originally posted on Facebook ( Read more... )