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Kim Addonizio
Introduction to Poetry

Psychiatrists are not poetic.
Neither is flatulence, or anything involving the intestines.
Breasts are more poetic than penises

or vaginas. Or sunsets.
But better a penis and a vagina than a sunset,
especially a sunset over the glittering ocean, over the craggy peaks.

Rainbows: not an especially good idea
unless your name begins with Elizabeth
and ends with Bishop, and you are referring not to a rainbow

but to oil in a little rented boat. Oil has become more poetic
than ever, due to its listing in the thesaurus
as a synonym for suffering. Which

is more poetic: legless child, drowning polar bear, heartless lover?
If your house was burning down,
would you save

a) your grandmother,
b) the Picasso,
c) your latest poem, the best and truest one
you’ve ever written, which you will revise
to include an elegy for your grandmother,
using a cubist metaphor?

For revision is poetic, though it seemeth not so.
For thou shalt use no archaic diction
lest ye be stoned. In the Biblical sense of the word.

For I must tell you again and again
to show. For when you tell,
ye are as rainbows at sunset arching over the breasts

of beautiful women.
For your ignorance is vast
but I assure you mine is vaster.

For my selective serotonin peuptake inhibitor
rises in the night sky among the starry faes.
For a poem should not be mean; it should be darling

as a lapdog, but never yap. A poem
should only open its trap to praise—
and fuck anyone who says otherwise.

Do not use the word fuck gratuitously.
Come to think of it, the penis is perfectly poetic
if used thusly: O my mushroom, we are as microvilli

in the body of the world,
its bleary incandescence, its corporations’ need
to dress us like skeletons and hoard all the candy.

The fucking shits. I love you so much, baby.
No one should say that in a poem.
Fuck. Shit. Love. Now write.

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