Letter to the Editor

Dear Editor,

I'm the type of person who wants to feel the poem, to be the poem, to masticate the poem. I want to enter the poem like a sperm and leave it like a newborn; I want to come back to Mama in a poem, to climb up the umbilical cord and swing back down and be delivered like a bungee jumper off the cliffs of Acupulco. I want to get in the poem the way that Galway Kinnell got inside that bear; I want to smell the turd; I want to eat the... well, anyway, there's nothing in the world that I hate more than a poem that minces and whines and says, “Not tonight Sylvester, stop acting like a baboon.”

So imagine my dismay when I came across your magazine, sitting there on the Borders magazine rack, displaying the name Poetry, like a soy nugget at a tailgate party. I read the thing from cover to cover and not once did I get what I come to poetry for, which is to feel like I've just had the top of my next door neighbor, Suzanna, taken off. I don't want to read about some Viking monument that you learned about in history class. I don't want to read about how the smell of a sand dollar makes you miss your dead grandmother. I don't care whether or not your sonnet rhymes. I'm hungry, man, and I want to eat some poetry. Throw a hog a corn cob. Throw this dog some meat.