Sometimes Talking to a Wannbe Poet Makes Me Feel Like a Dumb Polack
Published July 23rd, 2008 | 
Q: How do you drive a Polack crazy?
A: Put him in a round room and tell him to go stand in the corner.
With all due respect to Poles — I certainly mean no offense, but talking to aspiring poets does sometimes make me feel like I’m the dumb Polack in one of those old jokes.
Case in point: The other day this guy I know reads me this poem of his that he had just written and asks for my opinion about it. It’s a short poem but I listened closely. As far as I could tell from his reading of it, it’s about the environment and war and about how we are destroying our planet. Or, at least, I thought the one image of a beast devouring the earth (aside from it being a bit of a cliche) was intended as a metaphor for mankind’s own appetite for destruction. I’ll admit that I didn’t quite understand why this guy pluralized the word “planet.” I told him what I thought the poem was about and asked him why he chose to say “planets” instead of “planet.” Instead of giving me a simple answer, he dismissed my interpretation and started talking about the Book of Revelation.
“Okay,” I said. “So this is not intended metaphorically. This is a literal biblical reference of an event depicted in Revelations.”
“No. It’s not,” he said. “It’s about personal struggle . . . blahblahblah, etc.”
“Well,” I replied. “I’m not getting that at all. There’s just this one image floating loose in the air. Where’s the personal struggle come in?”
“It’s not about personal struggle,” he says.
Now I’m getting kinda pissed-off. Is this guy fucking with me or what?
“But you just said it was about ‘personal struggle’. Now you are not only contradicting me, you’re contradicting what you just said about you’re own poem. Look, I —”
He cuts me off: “I don’t write poems for other people. I enjoyed writing this poem. If you don’t like it, tough.”
“But you read it to me and asked me to respond. You don’t want to hear what I got to say or answer my questions, why’d you bring it up? And I never said anything about whether I liked it or not. I’m just trying to get a handle on it.”
“That’s the point,” he said. “It can be interpreted many different ways. However you think . . .”
“No. I told you what I thought it was about and you said I was wrong. So, obviously, it doesn’t have multiple interpretations. So, what the fuck man — throw me a lifeline ‘cuz I’m drowning in a bucket of shit!”
He stormed off in a huff, having nothing more to say on the matter.
Me? I was getting a beast devouring headache.
