bollocks bollocks bollocks

America's new Poet Laureate, Donald Hall, in the latest issue of Poets and Writers Magazine:

Q: Any career advice for aspiring poets?

A: ...read the old boys and revise. Revise endlessly. Never show a poem to anybody else until you have worked on it yourself for a couple of months.

If ever a piece of advice was putrid before it hit the page, this would be it. Here's the advice of Shailja Patel, Poet Laureate of Nowhere.

(1) Before you read a single 'old boy', read Alice Fulton on the poetry of inconvenient knowledge. Ask whose voice is not being heard, whose life is unseen, in each line you read.

To approach otherness, not clinically but heartfully, is difficult; it takes humility. A poetry of inconvenient knowledge asks men to think deeply about women's historical and biological situation, a request that entails some empathy, if not self-effacement.

To write without considering otherness in any of its forms is to write a poetry of narcissism. The most offensive poetics creates White World, Straight World, Man World and calls it Universal World.

(2) Revise a poem for two months?!?! That's a prescription for artistic anorexia. It comes straight out of the Genius Flourishes In Isolation Myth.

I am tired of little tight-fisted poets sitting down to
shape perfect unimportant pieces.
Poems that cough lightly — catch a sneeze.
This is the time for Big Poems
roaring up out of the sleaze,
poems from ice, from vomit, and from tainted blood.

Gwendolyn Brooks

The best best best way to revise a poem is to read it to someone else. To write 3 new poems, and then come back to the first. To share your work with your artistic community. To be alive in the world, generous and largehearted with your own work and the work of others. To listen and speak and keep the wells open and trust your own voice.