Official scribblers, when I was a poet,
Whinged, driveling into an MFA void—
Interminably.
Intolerable, as if God were a literary milquetoast
with no poetic spine,
capable of little. An MA advisor.
If weird line breaks mean anything at all—
totally done with that.
Tepid sort of academic brown-nosing,
tedious rehash of predictable Modernism
obfuscating in rarefied tones, in some chapbook
boringly academic, same as it always was,
except offering their inferior product to no one.
And then before long, an awful new
poem is born. Cringingly dull.
Pennsylvania
Other children, when I was a child,
would at times invoke the inner light—
I misunderstood.
I thought it meant God scorches
within us, and God, like a torch,
can go out. That was so long ago.
I’ve since ceased my believing in death—
there’s no such thing.
There’s only a kind of brownout,
the whole of the globe turning
off for a moment, then shuddering
back, the same as it was,
except one person short.
And then before long, an utter new
person is born. Somebody worse.
(Natalie Shapero)
find a poem, and then write a new poem that has the shape of the original, and in which every line starts with the first letter of the corresponding line in the original poem.