Snob

I admit it—I’m a snob, but not your everyday, garden variety snob. I don’t give a flying fuck what kind of car you drive, what schools your parents could afford to send you to, how much money you have/make, or what your maternal grandmother’s maiden name was. All of that shit is irrelevant to me.

But I will judge you for your grammar, mechanics and diction, especially your apostrophe use (in most cases, it’s apostrophe abuse), your subject-verb agreement, your parallelism, and your pronoun usage, especially reflexive pronouns. I might be polite and abstain from mentioning it, but it’s not kindness; it’s silent judgment.

I get especially snooty when I read something that’s whining about a lack of recognition for poorly written rhymes with no literary devices aside from intrusive end rhyme. Intrusively rhyming couplets are the worst; they make me want to stab my ears and eyes, just to make them go away. Yes, absolutely write through your feelings, but everything isn’t a poem, even if it fucking rhymes.

I’m easily seduced by effective alliteration, linguistic resonance, allusion, internal rhyme, and a cadence that captures me, and a good, extended metaphor makes me want to take my clothes off and lie down with a poem.

Some of what I write is good, some of it is mediocre, some is garbage, and some is fucking brilliant. I read and write enough to know the difference, even when it’s one of my babies—that’s why I keep an orphan file. William Faulkner, I love you, but no fucking way am I killing my darlings. Instead, I harvest them out of the sewage I originally put them in and place them in an orphans or halfway house file so they don’t go down the drain with the crap I flush out of my files.

My undergrad advisor recognized my talent and advised me to keep reading and writing and suggested an MA in literature instead of a Creative Writing MFA. Twenty years later, I see why he advised that. Most of my undergrad professors are retired now, and some no longer walk, talk, read, or breathe, but I’m still learning from all of them, and they’re still teaching me well: I hear Dr. Evans telling me to stop screwing around with poetry and self-indulgent bullshit and do the hard work of crafting the fiction. Sometimes I listen, and sometimes I even obey. I also remember him telling us, his fiction workshop students (7 of us) that we can do anything we can get away with on the page but to remember that nobody gets away with much for long, kind of a literary equivalent of everything’s legal if you don’t get caught.

So, what’s my point? Without being too much of an asshole, my point is to work harder if you’re not pleased with your results. Read more classics, read more critical theory—there’s more to free verse than most people think. There are no rewards for bleeding on the page with no consideration for the reader. A poem should tilt perspective, give meaning new meaning, present a facet of life that tends to go unnoticed. If it’s just a bunch of rhyming “I’m so miserable because of unrequited love,” it’s not art, it’s a journal entry. Sorry, not sorry. I’m a literary snob.