The Anthologist

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HELLO, THIS IS PAUL CHOWDER, and I'm going to try to tell you everything I know. Well, not everything I know, because a lot of what I know, you know. But everything I know about poetry. All my tips and tricks and woes and worries are going to come tumbling out before you. I'm going to divulge them. What a juicy word that is, "divulge." Truth opening its petals. Truth smells like Chinese food and sweat.

What is poetry? Poetry is prose in slow motion. Now, that isn't true of rhymed poems. It's not true of Sir Walter Scott. It's not true of Longfellow, or Tennyson, or Swinburne, or Yeats. Rhymed poems are different. But the kind of free-verse poems that most poets write now-the kind that I write-is slow-motion prose.

My life is a lie. My career is a joke. I'm a study in failure. Obviously I'm up in the barn again-which sounds like a country song, except for the word "obviously." I wonder how often the word "obviously" has been used in a country song. Probably not much, but I don't know because I hardly listen to country, although some of the folk music I like has a strong country tincture. Check out Slaid Cleaves, who lives in Texas now but grew up right near where I live.

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