Intro to Poetry Writing
by Adam Scheffler
Turns out teaching poetry is more absurd
than writing it yourself
like being one of those guys at the airport
with the orange glowy sticks
waving the 80-ton plane down—
like being a coach yelling through
the bullhorn, cry harder,
zipping up and down
the line, yelling, stop moving about
and put your ass in a chair, and stare
at the wall until the motes in your
eyes wear the faces of your dead!
To the ones just starting out,
the ones taking the class for
an easy A, wielding their pen’s little spade
you yell Build me the Pyramids!
as they stab you in the leg with a cliché
or turn to you holding fake vomit
asking you to make it beautiful—
as we debate for 10 minutes
about whether the vomit would be more
moving if it were real, and then
suddenly it has a blood diamond
in it, or a button from a childhood bear’s
eye, a bear they held when dad was
hitting mom again.
Suggestions for improvement:
find what’s rattling its chains
in the third stanza, and free it, to settle
its unfinished business.
Feed it the blood offering of several
metaphors through the bars of the lines
then twist the draft like a Rubik’s cube until
nobody applauds—maybe we liked
that it wasn’t solved! They’ll shout, and
what is solved anyway—according to whom?
All you can do is hang your head, or hold
your hands up like two erasers of
supplication, offering up helpful
exercises to juggle death metaphors or go
running around with scissors
of the unsayable, then heave over
the rock of their hearts to count
the insects living underneath.
But how excellent
it is when a poem takes off
like running alongside a flaming
mine cart yelling, yes, burn
baby, burn! Like watching your dog
scattering up 20 swans at once,
or seeing a Christmas tree
suddenly get electrocuted,
and you want to spike their poems
to the ground in triumph
you want to dance around them like a
burning Wicker Man with a tiny
Nicholas Cage inside it, in an arcane
spring ritual both beautiful and horrifying.