Critical Poetry—Mather Schneider (Tucson, AZ)                              For more highly critical verse, see Critical Poems.    
 

The two types of poems that always come back m the mail are my angry poems and my sex poems. Unfortunately, that's almost all I write. I have written many bland, unoffending generic poems, yes, I'm ashamed to admit it, when I have lost track of who I am and why I started writing poetry in the first place. Sometimes I get a journal in the mail with one of my poems in it and I don't even want to show anybody because the thing is full of insipid poems that say nothing and do nothing and are nothing, mine right along side them just as pathetic. It's hard to stick to your guns, and it helps to know there are others out there feeling the same way about the small press and our society I have had a few verbal bouts with editors myself. What a bunch of little girls, eh? The emptiness of the journals amazes me. How in hell do they actually choose, every single time, out of thousands of submissions, the worst possible shit?

Rookie Bookie

There’s this new kid working at the bookstore.

He’s a senior creative writing student

at “The U.”

He comes up to me the first day

and questions me about Cummings.

I don’t know anything about Cummings.

I squirm out of it somehow.

The next day he comes up

wondering aloud about Milan Kundera.

I point to something over his shoulder

and run away.

The next day it’s John Ashberry.

He wants to know what I think.

I just stand there looking at him

as if he were a 5 year old

asking a hooker about love.
 

Another Disappointing Poetry Journal
I hate it when I can’t remember my dreams

and I have to rely on poetry    these poems written not

by human beings but by poetry machines   
ideas like dry rot   
lame analogies and metaphors stretched thin
as a teenager’s sorry excuse for a mustache 

flat liners united   
the music is about as interesting as the emergency

broadcast system   
and always the fat faces that front the camera

like a taxidermist's pride and joy   
frozen in that contrived state of waiting

for us to applaud,  
(the pause that follows their words like an empty well

into which we are to drop our accolades)
 

On the Trendiness of Eastern Religion

I Ching

like sound

of cash register