By tigerbeatdown
I kept to myself, pretty much. People thought I was weird. Maybe they were right. Nevertheless, I wrote poems that radically changed the game in terms of what meter and rhyme could do. I sent them to a popular critic at the time, and he completely did not get them, and wrote me lots of condescending letters about how I needed to “improve” the meter, rhyme, etc. THANKS, DUDE. Anyway, I became extremely cynical about the entire publishing industry, and wrote at least one nasty poem about it, and when I died, I instructed my sister to burn my manuscripts, because I didn’t want morons like that guy who offered to “fix” my poems to get their hands on them. She published them anyway. AFTER LETTING THAT GUY “FIX” THEM. FML.
PS: Scholars carefully de-crappified my poems and published the original editions, eventually. And now you guys are all, “oh, she’s the greatest American poet, she radically changed the rules of the form, blah blah blah.” To which I say: OH, YOU THINK?!?!?
2 years ago • Notes