Wednesday, April 21, 2010

Forbidden words

I tried to get my Facebook friends to remind me of words they'd been told should never be used in a poem. Some of their forbidden words are below.

Workshopping

According to Melinda,
art must be beautiful.

According to Jake,
each line should begin with a capital letter.

According to Rainer,
a poet who has not loved, lost, drunk, drawn blood, seen death,
and ideally done the killing is no poet at all.

According to Justin,
women can’t be funny.

According to Alex,
true poetry died with Sinatra.

According to Leona,
the letter “t” always symbolizes the risen Christ.

According to Stacy,
black is slimming.

According to Tina,
a line should never exceed eleven syllables.

According to Lucas,
one must never use the following words in a poem: heart, soul, moon, sun, languid, orange, moist, Nantucket, uterus, wine, couple, poet, poem, poetry, poesy, rose.

According to Carmen,
rules are made to be broken.

Also according to Lucas,
a poem should not mean, but be.
And it should take off the top of your head.
And maybe something else. It’s in the notebook somewhere.

According to Warren,
ignore the stuff you hear in workshops.

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