In the Kingdom of Poetry

Painting by Stephen Martiniere


In the Kingdom of Poetry


Don’t write poems
about yourself.

Don’t call attention
to your revelations

or make confessions.
Even if your intention

is to expiate pain,
overcome guilt,

temper your
understandable anger,

don’t excavate
your mother’s grief,

brother’s sexual torment,
sister’s thievery,

father’s self-hatred,
step-parent’s fortuitous star chart.

Feelings are not poems.
Relatives should be left

where they are found,
in the gutter

or by a cash register.
Don’t write poems

about others.
Leave out husbands,

divorcees, alcoholics,
pimply adolescents and nurses.

There is already a surplus
of bad movie scripts.

Forget about friends
and enemies,

anniversaries
and special moments.

Someone in the greeting card business
has already covered these topics.

Don’t write about
what is happening in the world,

the missing child
and the human remains,

the burning beach
and the swallowed page,

the president’s
fiftieth speech.

Whatever happened there
isn’t a poem.

Don’t try and prove
how sensitive you are.

Others have already
claimed to be plants.

It isn’t necessary to demonstrate
how insensitive you are.

as this is already
an indisputable fact.

Don’t write poems
linking

an ordinary event
in your life
­
–shaving, adjusting your bra, riding subway
admiring especially picturesque sunset–

to a significant moment in history
–pogrom, starvation, exile, assassination–

or to a myth–rape, jealousy, or rejection–
in fact to anything that has a theme.

Poems are not papers
delivered at conferences.

Don’t sing about the joys of the city
or list the virtues of rural life.

Don’t mention swans,
bologna, eyeball dryness,

or one-eared philosophers.
Picnics and paintings are not poems.

Don’t resort to drama
or telling lies.

Don’t use your yearning
as a starting point.

Secrets should be left
where they are.

Don’t stand up
in a burning theater

and announce,
“no one listens to poetry.”

Don’t write poems
about poets

being underpaid.
Throw away

your memories,
bury your mirrors.


John Yau

Posted over on Sibila


from Paradiso Diaspora