[Newspoetry] NA

[William Gillespie]

Well, I'll tell you kids, I used to think I was the oldest surviving
newspoet, until, on a tip from a friend, I found myself in a meeting of
recovering newspoets. That's right.

It was kind of thrilling. They made everybody speak, and when you spoke,
you had to say your name and admit you were a newspoet. I got kind of
choked up. I stammered when I finally said the words "My name is...
Dirk. And I'm a newspoet."

The crowd was diverse. All these people had been newspoets and let it
take over their lives. There were labor history students, open-source
evangelists, organic farmers, and, perhaps not surprisingly, even a few
people in their sixties, including two former members of the underrated
British rock band the Beatles.

"Thanks to Newspoetry," I said, "I now write in soundbites." There came
a murmur of understanding. "You always think you can control it, but you
can't control the internet, you can only become dependent on it. It is a
web, and you put yourself in its hands. You understand that you will
never be able to write poetry the way normal people do, you admit that
you have a problem."

People started snapping their fingers in the air.

"But the world is filled with other kinds of writing. And it is possible
that you will come to enjoy spending an evening with the book Dark
Alliance, the masterful work of journalism that exposed connections
between the Iran-Contra scandal and the L.A. crack epidemic of the
1980s. Or perhaps you will savor 365 Days, an anthology of one short
story a day for the year 1934, collected by writer-activist Kay Boyle.
For lonely periods, you can even try to read Louis Zukofsky's
book-length poem A. There really is a lot of stuff to read when you
aren't trying to write a poem a day. And though there will come times
when you are afraid to leave your house for fear of encountering the
sports section of the Daily Illini blowing down a deserted sidewalk, and
suddenly finding yourself in a nearby park driven to write a backwards
acrostic about the Seattle Sonics, you will learn to get by, and your
life, for all this, will not be so much worse than that of, say, former
poet laurate Robert Pinsky's."

It was a very warm moment. A few people clapped. Then we drank lots of
instant coffee and ate psilocybin.