When I was young, I just wrote and wrote and wrote. I have twenty-seven diaries and countless others lost along the way. My diaries also served as scrapbooks. I’d tape in ticket stubs, important letters, lyrics, poems. Most of the tape now yellow and brittle like the fingernails of the dead. I did’t imagine any future for myself as a writer. WHen I started writing poems, I never imagined getting them published. Only then I started sending them out, typing my nervous letters on onion skin letters to places like The Antioch Review and Crazyhorse. Then my disastrous MFA. I remember putting my manuscript together in my robe, chain-smoking, believing there were correspondences, rhythms, wit. I never dreamed that I would carry a tote bag filled with manuscripts. I never dreamed I would receive flowers from young writers. People ask me if I still write poems. The answer is still no.
What was the last poem you read? Wrote?
p.s. Back on Monday. I didn’t have time to twist August’s arm or find a phantom tollbooth to fill in. Love you and leave you, Betsy
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Why are poets such a-holes, you might ask. Is it their power with language, is it their widow’s peak streaked with white, is it their penetrating gaze or the way they pronounce poem pome? HOw about the way they read their own work? It’s like watching someone masturbate in slow motion. God, it’s gross. I used to love poetry readings, soaking up the beret life, drinking the warm Chardonnay. I fucking hate Chardonnay. And for some damn reason when I tell a waiter that I would like white wine, they always ask if I’d like Chardonnay. Is there something about me that screams Chardonnay? Why can’t they ask if I’d like a Pinot? A Sancerre? Another thing, poets think they’re better than other people.
Let’s talk about poets. Poooets. Wordsmiths. Visionaries. Mongrels. Thieves. When I was getting my MFA, someone asked the great William Matthews why poets didn’t have agents. “Because 15% of nothing is nothing.” When people discover that I have a degree in poetry and won a couple of prizes when I was still in diapers, they ask me with a hopeful longing, “Do you still write poetry?” And it sounds like, do you cavort with the angels, do you still touch yourself gently, or lay down in a field of alfalfa where wild ponies run?
What was your first literary orgasm? Roger W. Straus, venerable co-founder of FSG, claimed it was The 
I ruin another morning yet again. Downstairs, my husband reads Delillo’s new novel. He’s been up since dawn, reading, making notes in his tiny Catholic trained script. He is completely energized by some idea or sentence and he wants to talk about it. I make a face that can only be interpreted as: you’re not going to make me talk about writing. He wonders aloud how I do this for a living given how much contempt I have for most conversations about writing. He says he’ll never bring it up again. I say, good.
When I was in the fifth grade, I was crazy about my English teacher Miss Presnell. She has horse hair clogs and played Jethro Tull’s Aqua Lung during class, handing out the lyrics for us to analyze.
A lot of really nice things happened while I was away. Makes you wonder if it’s sometimes better to clear out instead of trying to make things happen. On the other hand, that’s my job description.
Betsy Lerner 