Chapter 8: Troubleshooting
If your poet is not responding
and has failed to produce poems
on demand, there may be
a number of reasons why.
First, check your poet’s
sense of outrage. He may be
deficient in a certain
internal disquiet that poets
need to properly lament
the current state of society.
If this is the case, apply a
healthy dose of images
of disaster victims,
transcripts of pompous
politicians jabbering,
or have him thumb
through a few pages of
Snooki’s latest book.
If your poet is sufficiently
outraged, then the problem
with your poet may lie
in a too-happy heart.
Everyone knows poets
thrive on grief and maybe
a little self-loathing.
To correct this deficiency
and restore your poet
to proper working order,
gently crush his heart:
take another lover, perhaps,
or murder a dear parent,
and poems are sure
to gush forth.
(Alternately, if your poet
is too despondent, you
might need to make him
giddy. Try kissing him,
and if that doesn’t work,
you might need to resort
to something drastic, like
giving him a book deal.)
If the methods outlined above
fail to improve your poet’s
output, your poet might be
defective or obsolete and
in need of replacement.
Watch for these warning signs:
an alarming attraction to
Blake-esque rhymes,
a flagrant disregard for the
rules and structure of your poet’s
language of choice,
or the telling inability to name
any other poet who is not yet dead.
