Felt. What is felt by the poem?

The response of the listener. Collectively, an audience. (By the way, are there felt poems in contrast to linen, cotton, polyester, or wool poems?)


Consider how a meal is felt by those engaged in dinner conversation. Their mouths satisfied in gradations of pleasure.

Sandwich. How is a poem like a sandwich?

Handcrafted. Personal. Somewhat organic. Decidedly, open-faced.


About the tangible sandwich: always (well, almost always) something green and nothing borrowed.

Stolen. What is stolen from a poem?

The moment.

About food, it's what can't be stolen. Memory.

OK, same with a poem. We're at a crossroads; let's have lunch.

Hues. Are a poem's hues seasonal?

Like food, it's about ripeness. Think tomatoes. They come green and red and sometimes the green are ripe just as they are. Sometimes, not. OK, yellow, too.

Perhaps, it's also about emotion and attraction.

Seriously. What is poetry, seriously?

Word/sound play & construction as cooking is color/taste play & construction. The simply, seriously.

Admit. What does poetry admit to?

The sound of its words including the silence and/rattle of space.

With cooking, food admits to the engery of it's ingredients and always steps up to the plate with color.

Linen. If poetry were linen, what properties would it display?

Qualities of crispness. Travails of the rumpled.


The world is right when the meal is set with linen napkins. Faux-linen, OK, too.

Signposts. What are the signposts in a poem?

Punctuation & space. Words meeting precipice.

In cooking? Color & contour.

Gestate? How long does the average poem gestate?

First, there's no average in poetry.
Second, it's the poet and not the poem who is conceived and developed.


Now, how long does a peach gestate? Depends upon whether it's the fruit or tree under observation.

Simple. By nature can a poem ever be truly simple?

Letters are straightforward and reliable. Words aren't especially in the aggregate.

Of food, the potato is simple. Vichyssoise is eloquently complex.

Astrophysics. Why do some consider poetry on a par with astrophysics?

Or it is nuclear medicine?


For the same reason some consider cooking, brain surgery. Artichokes, in particular.

Mayhem. Which kind of poetry fosters syntactical mayhem?

Or it is the poet rattling word & space.

Mayhem in the kitchen? Simply tally the number of dishes to be washed.

Pebbles. Are small poems like pebbles?

If so are odes and epics, boulders?

I think small poems (micro poems?) are grains of rice. All kinds of rice -- white, brown, red, green/tea, forbidden.

Artificial. What's artificial in a poem?

The poet's signature -- sometimes imbedded, sometimes skimming the surface.


Same with a meal made with two or more ingredients.

Intrinsic. What's intrinsic about a poem?

Construction of word(s). Designated space. Where windows will (be) and the unarticulated parentheses.



What follows next are a few examples of the intrinsic in food. Carrots: sweetness. Chili : fire. Jicama: crunch. All of the above might (also) be intrinsic in a poem (noun as well as attribute).

Blowtorch. What ensues when you take a blowtorch to a poem?

Incendiary words. Then ash. Then nothing.

By comparison, when you blowtorch creme brulee, you create the signature crust. People applaud.