Poetic Irony and Me Rolling My Eyes

Last week there was a Creative Writing Conference at SUU...which I didn't attend. Mainly because last week was one of those weeks when I wondered why in the world I'm going to school, and also because I had a nasty cold. As part of the conference there were two writers invited to speak. One is a fiction writer and one writes poetry. Since I'm in a poetry class, my teacher scheduled to have this poet, we'll call him "Bob" come and speak with our class last Thursday.

I was looking forward to Bob's visit. We had been reading out of his recent book of new and collected poetry, and although some of it made me go, "Huh?" most of it was nicely done. Unfortunately, I was disappointed in his visit.

I'll admit he gave some good advice. He told us that spewing out words on the page, the good with the bad, is a good way to write because you can go back later and clean up the messy bits. He said that what you're interested in and involved with quite frequently will make it's way into your poetry, and it should. But then, he had some qualities that, for me, stereotyped him into this "poet" category.

One time he made a comment along the lines of disbelief that someone in an upper division poetry class could never have read a Shakespeare play. Whistle, whistle, whistle. That would be me. He also said he never reads contemporary poetry or fiction. He tries not to read anything after written after 1945, with very few exceptions. So, apparently he shouldn't read his own poetry? He works in workshops at Standford. So does that mean he doesn't read his students' poetry either?

Yesterday in class we discussed some of the things we learned from his visit (I kept my mouth shut), and my professor mentioned what the poet had done after our discussion last week. As the students filtered out, he turned to my professor and said, "Look at that!"

"Look at what?" my professor asked.

"That pencil sharpener! I haven't seen one of those in years. It's so beautiful." he said. She then went on to say that this is what he does. Even while he's discussing with other people he's constantly taking in his surroundings. And she told us that's why she had to guard his time so carefully, because he gets tired very quickly from doing that.

Seriously? He gets tired from noticing a manual pencil sharpener? Are you kidding me? I'll just die if I come across a poem of his entitled, "Ode to a pencil sharpener in Cedar City." Really, I'll just keel over and leave this world, probably from laughing too hard.