T A B L E_ T A L K

Are America's ivy-covered walls withering from incompetence? Discuss the state of higher learning in the Education area of Table Talk

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Unleash your poetic muse in barnesandnoble.com's poetry section
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R E C E N T L Y

Darwinian admissions
By Megan Olden
Are selective universities turning a blind eye to some students in need?
(01/18/99)

Only the nearly perfect need apply
By Jennifer King
With medical schools rejecting the vast majority of their applicants, what's an aspiring Hippocrates to do?
(01/15/98)

Bad chemistry
By Lori Gottlieb
When your lab partner is an obsessive compulsive, not even the data is safe
(01/13/99)

Camille on Campus
By Camille Paglia
As academics allow our state education to languish, private parochial schools may lead to more cultural divides
(01/13/99)

Is history dead?
By Sean McMeekin
Cultural studies scholars are ravaging the facts to suit their bassackward theories
(01/11/99)

BROWSE THE
IVORY TOWER
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A number of weeks ago a little nine-line poem appeared in my mailbox on half a sheet of inkjet printer paper. It had no signature.

In the course of my editorial work for a small college literary magazine, I have offered my campus mailing address for submissions of poems, short stories and essays. I am not therefore unaccustomed to finding amateur literature in my mailbox. It is unusual, however, for such literature to arrive unsigned. Most aspiring college writers aspire to skip the aspiring stage altogether and arrive with a flurry of press releases on the New York Times bestseller list. Thus they are eager to attach their names to the pieces they assume I will place in the magazine.

But this poem was different. It began with the word "I," which immediately made me skeptical. Everyone who works in publishing (at whatever lowly level) has certain quick and dirty rules by which to judge the likely quality of incoming work before actually reading it. This poem's first word violated mine. The mailroom is a bad place for poetry, and since I was so far unimpressed, I stuffed it in my backpack with my newspaper and my textbooks and went home.

Sometime early that (or possibly the following) evening I found the unsigned poem stuck to a lint-covered cough drop at the bottom of my bag. I threw the cough drop away and tried to read the poem all the way through. Much of it was abstract, or at least obscure, and I was not at all sure I had the gist of it. The state of contemporary poetry being what it is, however, this uncertainty was grimly familiar, and I continued to read. By the time I reached the third line from the end I decided that the poem was addressing me personally. This was disorienting, especially since I still didn't know what it was saying, so I stopped reading. Cover letters address me personally; angry responses to rejection slips address me personally. Poems and submissions usually pretend to more general interest.

My bedroom is my "office," and piles of items requiring attention cover practically all of its surfaces. Some people have "in" and "out" boxes. Instead of boxes, I have heaps, and instead of "in" or "out" I have "here" or "someplace" or "huh?" So the poem went in the "huh?" heap, and I went downstairs to dinner.

Later that (or the next) evening, I found this poem for the third time. It had fallen off the "huh?" pile and was now mixed in with the best-untitled agglomeration of dirty socks and underwear on my floor. I read it determinedly all the way through, and became (although no more sure of its meaning) completely convinced that it was not a submission at all, but rather an urgent personal message from someone who believed that only the formlessness and loose logical requirements of modern poetry would serve their purposes. Modern poetry has existed for almost 100 years without anyone feeling this sense of utility about it, so I was pretty impressed, and I read the poem again, with even greater attention. Unfortunately, if I had had to paraphrase the poem at this point I would still have been constrained to say it was some variation on the "I ... something ... you ... you ... something" theme. I restored it to its rightful place on some pile or other and went to sleep.

The very next (or possibly some other) day I found another unsigned poem in my campus mailbox, written evidently by the same person and printed on an almost identical half-sheet of paper. It went directly into my backpack together with some junk mail and a request from His Holiness the Dalai Lama that I join his effort to kick the Chinese out of Tibet. Certainly the Chinese have no business in Tibet, but I confess that upon returning home I immediately turned my attention to the new poem. This one began with "Imagine," rather than "I," so my instinctive incomprehensible angst-ridden confessional poetry alarm did not go off. I was now able to definitively paraphrase the poem in the following terms: "I ... something ... look at you all the time ... something ... something."

N E X T_ P A G E .|. Could this elliptical bard be the postmodern babe of my dreams?