If you are of the opinion that the contemplation of suicide is sufficient evidence of a poetic nature, do not forget that actions speak louder than words.
– Fran Lebowitz
The National Endowment for Poetry thanks you for your interest in promoting poetry at large in the general culture. Fellowships are competitive. Therefore, in order to help us evaluate your work, please read the following category descriptions carefully and note the examples before submitting any manuscript.
The National Endowment for Poetry accepts cross-genre work, but it is less likely to be awarded fellowships because the Endowment maintains that one of the signs of mature poesis is a singular style and voice that fits into one of the categories below.
We look forward to reading your work and please remember, allow one year for evaluation, and do not submit any further manuscripts until we have reached a decision on your current one.
Category 1: The Late Post- Modernist Formalist School of Suicidal
Poets who Write Traditionally
This style is best used to express sentiments of alienation and general late post-modern malaise while at the same time offering the reader a sense of comfort with traditional poetic devices and guaranteeing that even if nobody understands what the person is writing about, his or her work can be sold to anthologizes for schoolchildren who will read it on the level of sounds and not pick up on its despair. The genre employs traditional devices such as the alliteration, assonance, and rhythm one notes in the following example by E. F. Tinterfeldt from his collection, “Mahigany” (which received a fellowship from us just before Tinterfeldt’s self-inflicted death by swallowing a teaspoon of Drano mixed with sleeping pills):
Wildly wiggling one woebegone Wednesday,
I came across a skittering chicken.
Wildly wondering where I was wand’ring,
The chicken listened as this I told my tale:
Listen O chicken, spoke my soul.
A kittering finnish begittining wimbly.
Aminish darvish stinnerish tinsy.
Minicus, tinicus frighten and tensley!
The chicken stuttered, stammering in frenzy
“Whence comes this fluttering, stuttering whimsy?”
Finicus, tinicus, chicken was flimsy.
Sarcophagus dropped its stew in Guernsey.
Although the poem does not make sense, once notes how the poet skillfully employs use of figurative language in order to convey this senselessness, thereby expressing the meaninglessness of late post-modern living. Note also how, despite writing in a manner that was playful and almost childish, as some critics have noted, he was still a deep guy who had deep existential despair and this therefore qualified him as a serious poet.
Category 2: The Down-home-by-the-New England Fire School
Although it eschews any formalist tendencies, this category is capable of expressing both bucolic and domesticated emotions recollected in Wordsworthian tranquility while not shying away from the harsh realities of life, as in this example by Dora Wood, from her collection Pond-Freezings:
I came in past the old L.L. Bean boxes on the sun porch
You had saved from every Christmas. Outside
The ducks burrowed their heads on the frozen lake
And I counted on my fingers
The winters we had skated there as children. By now
The year has escaped me when Allison
Had drowned out there. The only thing they’d ever found
Was her red check scarf, a floating tube of lip balm.
The scarf was the same check material
Made of flannel you wore now, unafraid as you were
To tell me you had cancer.
Note the matter-of-fact subtlety of tone, the voice of a woman learning her poet-husband-lover is dying as she finishes reminiscing about a drowned schoolmate.
Category 3: The Post-1950s New York School of Confessional Poetry
that Can Be About Anything
This form, which hinges on the poet’s wry wit and ability to make up profound-seeming work out of apparently anything, has been popularized by the likes of Tim Duncan, whose first collection, Spinning Around on the Rocking Horse until You Are Dizzy, contributed largely to the re-popularization of poetry after it had reached its post-modernist extreme. The title of this selection is “Sitting Down to Write one Thursday Morning.” Note the innovative enjambment:
Looking out my window past my word processor
In the town where I live
Just north of Manhattan, it occurred to me that
All of the poems I’d written describing hollyhocks
Were wrong, because the plant I’d been looking at
All along was hydrangea. No matter.
Beethoven thunders out of speakers across the
Hardwood floor
With its one shaft of light and well, I can
Still say I have
Poetic feelings even with my fucked-up sense of botany.
Duncan is appreciated for his frankness and candor, but remember there is more than meets the eye here. Note: If you are going to submit work in this style, be sure you bring it to a deeper level than a shopping list, which is what we felt about the following example submitted by an unknown poet from Georgia two seasons ago, entitled “Canning.” As you will note, the poem is clearly derivative of Duncan’s style while having no greater scope than the mere quotidian, so please do your best to avoid this:
I sat down to write a poem but nothing happened
Why not can some peaches instead? I thought.
After all, the harvest was good and it wasn’t
Too cold out.
Category 4: The Dregs of Literary Life School
Similar to The Post 1950s New York Confessional School, work in this category hinges on familiarity—not so much with daily life as much as with literary figures about whom there are ample cultural myths. In short, one must have either a) been married to a literary figure, b) slept with one or c) had a platonic relationship with one although the person was nevertheless found dead from an overdose in your house or apartment—whether this person was a poet, essayist, novelist or critic, as in the following example by Robert Billings regarding his platonic friendship with Elsebeth Niedermeier, entitled “Shoebox Filled with Conches”:
Conch-shells you had sent me, each one
Labeled as size, type, structure—a little
Winding hideaway of its own. We had wandered
[note how the line too wanders] too far, you and me.
My wife said she knew, but then again I told her
There was nothing to know. Then why the
Conches? she asked, and I puzzled over how to explain
You were in an insane asylum
Near an ocean.
Category 5: The Foreign School of Exotic Metaphors and Unchained Eros
This school, led by the Hindu poet Dharmish Fharinghani and the Muslim poet Svargan Khatab, creates metaphors tied to the cultural trappings of exotic places away from the Anglo-American world and uses them to create a sexual mythology that expresses liberation from the stringent demands of fanatical Hindu and Islamic beliefs, as in the following poem, “Makhma as a Type of Insidiousness” by Khatab:
No matter, of its own, my phengphalam flies out to you in the night
Like a million dwevishnus, seeking you, probing for you
Through the minghala wands of trucnul. Late I come to America
Where here, no one enchains my pfudu, ties a ring to it
Or nails it against a wall as I go flailing…
We hope the categories and examples given will enable you to clarify your own voice more while at the same time allowing you to see the possibilities inherent in a given genre. Thank you again for submitting your work to the National Endowment for Poetry and for helping to keep poetry alive in this great country of ours.
