Greatest Living Poet

Teach Me Tonight

* Seriously. Can someone explain to me why the #1 choice of professions for poets has become putting other poets in debt? I understand the Cycle of Hazing. We were hazed thus we haze. But is there any poet in America that actually thinks they can make *every* poet that happens by their workshop a *better* poet? I doubt it. They choose a few that are talented, give themselves credit for that talent, and then drink themselves into another morning.

But, knowing this, how do we approach burgeoning professors of the next generation? It's good that we're taking jobs from geezers, I'm always for that. Fuck anyone over 40 :o! But that we're simply satisfied to continue the cycle? Problematic. Just because you assign your friends books rather than some geezer professor's selected syllabi of friends, or make them read The New American Poetry instead of The Norton Anthology of Poems that Sound Like They're Ashamed to be Poems doesn't mean you're _reaching_ students. There are as many kids that wanna write Orpheus and Eurydice poems for the rest of their lives as there are that wanna flarf it up. What happens to Orpheus, Jr. when you give him or her Petroleum Hat, a book I think Kicks Ass. SOME IF NOT MOST POETRY STUDENTS WANT TO BE MAINSTREAM POETS AND ARE TRAINED FROM AN EARLY AGE TO LOATHE ANYTHING THAT'S NOT FIRST-PERSON NARRATIVE (see also: every lousy old counter-revolutionary boring blogger). Your tastes will not equal their tastes. The poems you LUV might crush their little souls and make them running screaming for the soft and billowing fields of prose. I hope you're proud of yourself. Which might be fine by me: poets ought to get tougher and be able to be pushed around less, not more. Recent run ins make me think that poets are about as tough as basement-dwelling dungeonmasters and their nerd-class -1 enchanted friends. And I'm talking about poets that have met me! Who know the persona is bullshit! Toughen up, you wussies. Poetry isn't for the weak-kneed and the cowering! We're marginalized throughout the land because not enough have the courage to stand up for Anything, not enough are willing to say Anything interesting (for fear that anything over a tiptoe sends their Careers Kaput) and because we act like we're all for each other but we're actually just backchanneling each other about what a dick everybody else is. Way to go. This is a front-channel. Get tougher or go write a novel. Who needs more boring, benign (non-hottie) poets? No one. Shape up, punks.

At best, any professor in an American College or University is a Vichy Collaborator. At worst, they are Klink. Who, as we know, knows and sees nothing. Adjuncts are just following orders, pity them. Papergirls make more. But the cycle of teaching, like the cycle of abuse seems to grant only the right to teach and to abuse: not to actual lift students out (aren't they supposed to be Creating Independent Thinkers? How's that Coming Along?).

So, literally, any professor: tell me how you sleep at night. And not just professors: anyone who charges poets anything to be in the same room and absorb their (no doubt limitless) advice on the subject of being a more successful poet. What did you do in class today that was worth putting kids into perma-debt and putting yourself at the head of the class. Howcome there are no Poetry Nascar drivers? Or poets willing to take one for the team and actually get in front of some damned cameras or microphones or whatever? When Ginsberg died it was on "World News Tonight". When most poets croak they barely hit google news. So people who decry any poet that says Look At Me are simpering dumbasses (self-loathing closethumpers who feel like poets should neither be seen or heard. How's that working out for you, margin-boy? There is no grace in being invisible. Every poet already is. Anyone who allows themselves to be silenced by anyone deserves to be silenced.). I'd also like an example of any poet who is remarkably better just because they went to workshop (like workshop is such a happy place for poems to live). How much credit can much-too-busy-and-too-career-driven poet teach students (other than how to be an obnoxious, neurotic mess) that getting laid, being a few years older, reading some stuff and being considered a poet in the eyes of other can't get them? Not a whole lot of credit. There are no Robin Williamses telling you to stand on your desk. Why not have classes on schmoozing, the correct ways to eat cheese and drink wine, grant-writing and fellatio for dummies? Wouldn't those be more worthwhile curriculum for the chicken soup of the young poets' soul? Everyone knows poets who inexplicably get things they are much too lousy to have: must have been the Air Jordans! Let's just drop the pretense it's about poems at all: which insults us. We're broke but we know better.

We handwrote Evangeline for punishment in 8th Grade and spent most of High School focused on what the White Chickens *represented*. What will you tell your kids about poems? It's 10 o'clock, where the fuck are they. The desire to have "one's summers off" should not be the determining factor in who stands in front of classrooms. Why anyone would even want apostles is beyond me: like WHAT a hassle. Let this blog be your Lecture Course: the pill marked placebo cost you more than just your student loans. And what punishment should *pushing* such narcotics be awarded? Especially after you've seen the Oz behind the curtain and she looks like Gilbert Godfrey. I vote for a noodle spanking, under a hot Naropa sun, surrounded by orange-unied monks-in-training praying that the next time around you spend it as something useful like a three-eyed flounder. Gurgle! Subverting the immortal lines of a Faginism: Maybe Poets Shouldn't Teach for Five Years...