Happy World Poetry Day from Stupid Poetry!!

Hi, all! I hope you are having a nice Saturday and don’t mind this first-ever very special weekend newsletter. I was going to send it yesterday, but was then informed that today is World Poetry Day. So what better time for some Stupid Poetry.

It’s been a few weeks since my last post and I have been keeping busy with the more boring administrative parts of the writing process—sending out magazine submissions, entering contests, applying for grants and fellowships and the like. It’s been forcing me to think about poetry, in general, and my own poetry in a meta way. I’ve been answering a lot of questions about what I think defines my work—what ideas and issues am I engaging with; what do I think the role of poetry, as an art form, is in modern culture and how does my work meet that role. All of it makes my head hurt and I don’t like it! But you gotta do it.

When I get to these questions, I’m simultaneously reading my own work to figure out how to answer them. I scan through the 5 or 10 or 20 page writing samples I compiled for submission and find the narrative that in the smaller fractured narratives memories I have already plied out of my 30 years here on Earth. And when I’m reading through those writing samples, made up of pieces written in a span of roughly the last decade or so, I’m trying to think of the choices I made when writing these poems, of the authorial intent of a me who doesn’t exist anymore as they were. Why did I need to write these poems over the hundreds of others I could have written instead. And I think what I found as the through line is that each poem is an exercise in taking some small moment, good or bad, and choosing to let it be big. To let it be beautiful, or to let it be horrifying, but to regardless let it be and to find some emotional truth from it. Writing poetry is a choice to interrogate those moments and learn from them. It is a choice to make something out of whatever is in front of you. It’s a choice to imagine that things can be better. I think good poetry is a choice to believe that things can be better.

In that vein, a couple weeks ago, I hit a sobriety milestone that felt big a couple weeks ago. It has been over four years now since I have drank any alcohol. This year also marks 10 years since I went back to school to study poetry after dropping out and spiraling a bit when I was 18. Both in 2016 and 2022, poetry played a pretty big role in me choosing to move forward into lives that I could let myself belong in. Like writing poetry, sobriety is a choice you make over and over again because you believe, even when you don‘t, that things could be better than they are. In the worst days of my life, when I chose to write poetry, I chose to believe that the discomfort that became me could become something else. I wrote poems and chose to believe that on some later, better day I would be drinking root beer in my backyard watching a sunset with my wife. And when that came true I wrote poems to celebrate that.

A particular choice that has been important to my sobriety was choosing to have a nice frosty root beer every night (not quite that much at this point). A zero sugar A&W root beer sometime in the evening became the ritual that kept me away from worse choices. And so, for World Poetry Day, I give you a poem about sobriety and root beer. Hope you like it, and see you sometime soon.

A&W 

zero sugar 12 oz nightly 12 stones

taken from a river you’re resisting— 

the current, the thirst, the amoebas

in the sediment the water is a coffin

the sasparilla is a muddy shore  

mausoleums of moss, you wouldn’t believe 

the breaths i’ve held in between sips 

of root beer, i’d rather not stomach the air

im trying not to let the river fill my lungs 

i’ll always think of broken bottles, bloody glass

when i remember the riverbed 

i became thirst. i lost the best chance i had to

unbury myself. i ate cattails as they floated past

my tongue. i turned my hurt into a whitewater raft

and i slept in it while the river thrashed

when i was 21 i spiked every soda with rum

i lost days to bloody noses weeks to broken glass 

to bridge ledges to my own severed legs 

i threw them as far as i could and drank 

until i forgot why, where did i expect 

them to land

when i was 8 years old

i stood on the table at the A&W attached to the gas station on main street, my then favorite restaurant, 

and i watched the gulls perched on a cathedral.

i lifted a frosted glass over my head and spiked

a hot pink mini plush football that came with my 

kids meal into the dated geometric carpet 

it bounced back up with a yell from the cashier 

standing in the spot where a few years later i’d buy 

pack after pack of marlboro black and to my back

a half mile away the river ran high. i chugged

the soda from the tap and committed 

a full stomach to memory 

i dropped myself in a petri dish

with a splash of river water 

and i saw nothing under the scope but 

i know there was something there i 

willed my blood into wine i let it burn i blew

fire through bic lighters and swam in

the mississippi i worked the night shift 

and covered every sunrise in stained carpets

and i didnt feel the ground until i did 

i threw up hard root beer all over a strangers

lawn and slept on a bench at the riverwalk

as a child i was scared 

to drink root beer because i thought 

it was alcoholic. as a 

30 year old poet i drink it because a small part

of me wishes it was and as a 30 year old 

spouse a brother a friend i drink it because a miraculously larger part of me is glad it isn’t. 

when i was 27 i swallowed roses and 

finally felt how much i was bleeding

it pooled in my stomach and i mixed 

it with zero sugar A&W and that 

did something. i wrote poems to the foxes, the snakes, the moss on the lake and i drained 

the poison the blood the water the wine 

into a sapling and it became something else

there was so much aluminum, cans recycled 

into hooks to scrape the hunger

from my guts from my skull i collected 

catfish skeletons from the waters surface 

and i buried them under my garden 

surrounded them with river rock

in the backyard with my wife

the breeze cools the A&W can

in my hand before the sunset pulls 

it back to the river 

i never wanted to drown. 

i was born with a head underwater 

the moss i’ve collected 

apologizes to my bones.

ive baptized myself 

in river, in soda

in mud, in sunlight.