[Carl Copeland]

Ok, what have I got to lose other than my dignity? Here’s the first stanza of a blank verse poem I published in a college magazine (it’s all I can remember off the top of my head). I shut myself up in my dorm room and obsessed over it for endless hours when I should have been studying. The first line is ok, and I still like “cry his far hurrah,” but the rest is trash. I was apparently playing with Islamic mysticism, about which I knew next to nothing. I got one or two polite compliments, but the abject failure of this poem put me off writing more for decades.

The stars reveal my caravanserai
On sands that skirt the howling dervish world.
I kneel composed as night rolls back and hear
A bright muezzin cry his far hurrah.

[John Riley]

I'm in the process of writing a short essay for Better Than Starbucks and it's about to kill me. I even begged it to stop being so mean. After deleting more starts than I remember I realized there are no disastrous beginnings. There are beginnings that go in the wrong direction and when that happens I just delete it and write a new one. I have to be willing to write shit or I'll never write. I know my poems are inconsistent but if they weren't I'd lose interest. I'm not trying to write lovely artifacts. So if the beginning is embarrassing delete it, thank which god you approve of for letting you live in the computer age, and charge on.

[RCL]

This one got me thrown out of the Sacred Scriptures course:

The Self’s Prayer

“Prayers to yourself are always answered.”
R.W. Emerson

My Self, who dwells on planet earth,
is Everyman, my name from birth.
My realm is melting from the sun,
for I am causing my destruction,
denying Truth and being evil
in words and deeds, sacred and civil.
I say this prayer for the dead,
denying gravity’s reversed
to raise me from an earthly grave.
I pray, till then, that I’ll be brave,
suffer but endure my plight,
until my final breath takes flight
and I’m delivered from this fiction,
gratefully welcoming eviction!