Ten Sure Signs That You Have “Packet Fever”
March 30, 2008
9:57 pm
Ross
Poetry
- You feel guilty about the time you spent folding laundry even though you’re going to have to have something to wear tomorrow.
- You start thinking that a poem about lo mein isn’t such a bad idea.
- It’s Sunday night and you’re wearing the same shirt you woke up in Saturday morning.
- You’re logged in to Instant Messenger, Gtalk, Twitter, and your e-mail account hoping that someone, even a spambot, will send you a message, the first three words of which will help you solve that difficult Mark Strand poem.
- The ninth coffee didn’t give you the jitters, but it also didn’t give you the focus you were hoping for.
- Being identified as a language poet wouldn’t bother you, because nothing you have accomplished in the last couple days makes a damn bit of sense.
- You wonder what possessed you to commit to reading Lowell’s Collected Poems when you could have picked seventeen volumes no longer than Trethewey’s Native Guard.
- Larkin doesn’t seem curmudgeonly at all any more. He was dead right about everything and everyone.
- You avoid human contact. If your wife knocks on your door, you become furious that she had the audacity to interrupt to tell you she’s leaving you.
- You feel a strange sense of bliss, because you know it won’t last forever. You sort of wish it could.
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March 30th, 2008 at 11:08 pm
Larkin’s accuracy is directly proportional to one’s progress in any given MFA program. First few months: Larkin was a bitter bitter man. Last few months: Larkin was damn right, damn right, and you want to buy that man a beer.
March 31st, 2008 at 8:02 am
Hahahahahaha. Yes, Larkin gets more and more true as time passes. I hated him when I was an MFA student, but now I now consider him a God!