My Relationship with Poetry
makes zero sense.

I know this feeling, too. My passion for poetry is something my family and friends accept about me the way one accepts that a loved one has a lisp or acne scars. I live in a small town, where the local Baptist population routinely memorize Bible verses to quote at one another in odd places like the grocery store checkout line. When I respond with memorized Lawrence Ferlinghetti (or, God forbid, Allen Ginsberg), it only confirms what they already believed about me, that I am from Mars…