Poet talk

Two poets stayed up late last night, talking:

1. The best profession for poet is housepainting.

2. Poet reading his or her poem must never explain his or her poem before he or she reads it, as in "this is a poem about hitchhiking across the US and being picked up by a one-armed cocaine dealer with a white mustache in the desert near..." Footnotes are acceptable, however.

3. Poet must never finish writing anything, especially a poem.

4. Poetry is the most post-modern of all art forms, in that all the great poems have already been written over and over.

5. The worst profession for poet is teaching poetry; if poet must teach to earn his or her daily bread, it is better to teach poetry to children than to adults.

6. Poetic forms--a sonnet, sestina etc.--were created as a cosmetic to help bring the poem toward something resembling completion.

7. One out of three people in Los Angeles are poets; everyone's a poet in San Francisco.

8. Elizabeth Bishop was as indispenable to her time as Noelle Kocot is to hers.

9. But a century can only hold one great poet at a time.

10. If, at the end of a poetry reading, the audience remains silent, as if stunned, the poet reading is probably a poet. If there is a lot of laughter during the reading as well as those audible gasps among the audience in which it sounds as if someone's breath is being taken away, the poet reading is also very likely to be a poet.

11. Poems are born feet first in the emergency ward of a overcrowded metropolitan hospital, and all poet babies have birth certificates signed by William Carlos Williams.

12. A poet is born a poet, and dies a businessman or woman.