Art history matters. New Master’s degrees
Lead to dull innovation in poetry. Please
Try to write us a poem where meaning is plain
And no MFA patriarch needs to explain.

a statue carved by Bernini/a plate of eggs painted by Velázquez   

Jane, dear Jane, you’re a porcelain idol.
The time has arrived for your verse to unbridle
Itself and reveal some slight traces of life;
We know you are smart, but that dull butter-knife
Of your poetry, smearing the references ’round
Is like Sylvia Plath/Gertrude Stein/Ezra Pound…

personal pan pizza with unlimited free toppings

Those weird sudden line breaks confuse us, in fact,
And the rarefied dishes you name-drop get cracked
On the floor of your poetry, leaving us shards,
Risking splinters for muses and mystified bards.

my arm breaks off  like the shell/of a freshly-filled cannoli

You deadpan in monotone, stunningly brave,
But your tortuous verses go straight to the grave.
Academic obscurantists murmur and nod
As they lower the corpse of your work in the sod…

carelessly thrown baby/a designer toilet cistern

You ought to re-frame and then tighten your lines,
So replete with Old Masters and euro-trash wines:

Why would you not, then, aspire to coherence,
Dismissing the need for white male interference?
Your verses cry out for some fatherly guidance
To try and make sense of your history of silence.

Jane Yeh’s Why I Am Not a Sculpture  has a […] sense of playfulness, as she both compares herself to a sculpture and uses a series of rather silly and elaborate similes, along with references to dubious historical “facts.” Today, we challenge you to write a similar kind of self-portrait poem, in which you explain why you are not a particular piece of art (a symphony, a figurine, a ballet, a sonnet)

There will probably always be a conflict between obscurantism and populism in American poetry. The more obscure poets can in some cases claim inheritance from modernism. Their poems are toppled columns of a former empire. More reader-friendly poetry has a long tradition in the twentieth century that continued unabated directly beneath the grand experiments of modernism. There are those who still prefer the poetry of Rudyard Kipling to anything written after. If poetry has fallen out of favor with the general public, at least to the extent that it held with poets like Edwin Arlington Robinson or Walt Whitman, it is generally because of its purported difficulty. “I don’t get poetry” is a refrain often asserted even by avid readers. In the conflict between obscurantism and populism, populism would seem the way to the hearts of the many.

ERNEST HILBERT:  Contemporary Poetry Review

[…] it is the case that poetry lists are show horses. One would never yoke them to draw plow through field. In other words, they are kept. They must be subsidized. If not, publishers look immediately to them when mulling over poor annual returns. A recent example is Oxford University Press, which made the controversial decision to unload its poetry list for financial reasons. Not only did the list fail to make a profit, it was a white elephant. The ensuing clamor produced certain facts both instructional and a little obscene to the public. Jon Stallworthy, the very image of a literary gentleman, pointed out during the fray that such poets as Gerard Manley Hopkins failed to sire a great deal of profit for many years but are now canonical (thus very profitable to the farsighted editor). On the other hand, it became public knowledge that some of the poets on the Oxford Poets series had sold fewer than ten copies of their books. This was embarrassing for all involved.

  Ernest Hilbert at Contemporary Poetry Review

Rumors of White Supremacy.
In that row, your column’s number…
Coining new terms in secrecy:
“Boing” (boring minus R) is dumber.

Coiled, then boing like a prompted spring,
Primitive poetic action;
Apes with crayons, coloring;
Hooting in dissatisfaction.

Leaves leave a taste like baseless fears,
Primitive prompts in lyric night.
BOING!  The Jack-in-the-Box appears—
Laughing at your illiberal fright…

PROMPT #6 :  Find the row with your number. Then, write a poem describing the taste of the item in Column A, using the words that appear in that row in Column B and C. For bonus points, give your poem the title of the word that appears in Column A for your row, but don’t use that word in the poem itself.

Column A:  MINT         

Column B:  BOING         

Column C:  PRIMITIVE

☻ P L A C E B O I N G ☻