So I've been reading a lot of poetry lately

Inside joke. But it's true. I have been reading and writing a lot of poetry lately. As a poet (by which I mean that I write the stuff and am rejected from magazines and have a beard) one of the difficulties is finding other people who a)want to read your stuff b) care about poetry in general c) are not likely to spend the rest of the evening out debating the finer points of your sexuality. And by debating I mean pointing, staring, and occasionally fingering the trigger gaurds of weapons.

It's one reason I love academic life. Yesterday I ditched class ( some people may be under the misapprehension that the academic life inolves classes. This is a mistake. The academic life is actually the process of slamming ideas together as violently as possible in conversation until the meld into something new and useful. The wonderful thing is that this conversation can occur with books i.e. people who have been dead for hundreds of years. If you're reading this and go to college, skip class) and went with a few poets I've befriended to lunch. We ended up at this other poet's house sitting around and discussing meaningful things. Like who they hate in the department. In particular this one creature kept coming up who only writes in rhyme and meter, even if the poem suffers. This technique is fairly uniformly derided in modern American verse.

This goes on for a while, and then the whole thing breaks up. I go to the library for a bit, and then we all recongregate at the Poetry Awards for the department. One of the girls was reading something, and I was in the running for a prize ( = money to be spent on books and beer). I was emotionally involved. They had some professor's kid reading the names off, and he had some kind of speech impediment that everyone else found endearing but that garbled all he said into mash and had me fantasizing about sticking him in the space between the descending chalk boards (the chalk crypt). When the time for my award came up...the girl who writes in rhyme and meter wins. She's jubilant, I want to trip her. My poet friends shrug their shoulders and say "Well, she does have some good images, sometimes" which is poet speak for "I hope she doesn't get published before me".

But the reading was good, particularly Biz, the girl I mentioned earlier (who had a house) even though lisp boy kept talking during everybody's work, creating a distracting drone of ill used syllables. Despite that the force and passion of the work came out, and I think in some ways that is the beauty of poetry. We restrict passion so much in our society, as sort of hold over anglo culture fragment involving stiff upper lips and ulcers. When we do release these feelings, they are degraded to emotions. People are emotional, and they express their emotions. But who is passionate? Who enthusiastically follows anything other than a sports team without subjecting themselves to some degree of mockery? But when the poet speaks it creates that passion in other people, even if it is only passion for lyrical trees, love, or an image of home.

Afterwards, while we were all planning to go out drinking, lisp boy was entertaining himself with a bouncing ball. Fate struck it spitefully into the chalk crypt, and I felt justified in his distress.

Petty, but passionate. That's me.