1 Poem by William Walters

Advice for Poets 

To get a poem published in this Muse-forsaken age,

When formless, rambling blather is clearly all the rage,

You need to go and join the club, get with these modern times—

Ignore your different drummer, be deaf to beats and rhymes.

Load lines with catachresis--antimereia galore--

And don’t put words together like they’ve ever been before.

Forget imagination; don’t try to say what’s true.

Just be obscure—you’ll sound profound—and keep the language new.

Know current fads, stay strange and safe, don’t let your work stray far,

Or don’t expect to get a thing past journals’ MFAdar.

unleash a weirded wordsong release raw thoughts that rise

like little baby bubbles to the girders of irony in the mind

poetize your furtive feelings castrated and bleeding

folded up neatly to fit into mailboxes


Bionote

Wm. Walters grew up near Liberal, Kansas (How's that for an oxymoronic placename?) and now lives near Rockford, Illinois, where he's been a professor of English and linguistics at Rock Valley College for the past twenty-five years.  He has published poems in Chiron Review and other literary magazines in the US and the UK.