Poem-A-Day

Poets.org, which is the website for The American Academy of Poets, runs a series called "Poem-A-Day." As you might guess, they published one poem everyday. On October 20th, they published an awesome poem by Tina Brown Celona titled "Potentially Interesting & Secretly Devastating." You can check out the "poem flow" and other entries in the series here, but below you can read the text of the poem in full:

Potentially Interesting & Secretly Devastating

is never to give away your secrets

though people will guess

and say you write like the following poets

e.e. cummings Wallace Stevens Richard Brautigan

Ted Berrigan Frank O'Hara

though you'd prefer to be compared to

the Old Possum

and to me you sound a bit like Robert Creeley

who once was embarrassed by me at a party

he died a few years later.

It's easier to talk to you on the phone

after Nebraska which sounds

wonderful when you say it

even with loathing

and "formally innovative"

and "hybrid forms"

and the human being you are looking for

in my poem

because what are we but our words

in the end and what

are poems but perceptions

and who do YOU want to fuck

and how much do you want it

and what are you willing to do

to get what you want and how can you be satisfied

with what you have. Utterly sufficient

to be apart and how you will never say love

before October and I don't mind

or even know what I mean when I say it

whether what defines it is intensity or duration

of feeling or preordained by fate

which pushes us together and draws us apart

the one human voice speaking in all of our poems

what it felt like to be alive

and being in love is most alive

whether it's with the world or you or

poetry. In every aspect

no one resembles anyone

and can you become a poet just by trying

or do you have to go to an impressive school

and how poems are dangerous

when there are real people in them

and nothing is really new but only to you

and you are the most powerful pronoun