Do you want to know a secret?

I believe poetry is dead, obsolete. Dust. It is meaningless masturbation. Archaic. Poetry is for poets. Poetry is shit. Poetry is impossible to read and up it’s own ass.

I hate poetry. Still, I read poems and still I get furious with them. Sometimes I work for half an hour through one fat son of a bitch; 5 pages of references to Japanese emperors and Norse gods, and at the end of the poem I sit, normally drunk and lost, trying to figure out if the poem was about a dog, a girl, anything at all. I know why people don’t buy books of poems --- they make you feel stupid.

You’re not stupid and you shouldn’t buy things that are incomprehensible.

Poems, in my mind, are meant to communicate, pass along stories, emotions, ideas. I still read poems because sometimes you find a title, a phrase, a whole poem even, and it stops you. Summer’s line, "I need to have blues so I can have rhythm," is like that. It stops me and demands to be remembered.

To be honest, I see a line like that and I don’t give a fuck what the rest of the poem is about. It sounds cool. Summer’s set of poems will not make you feel stupid, they travel to real places and don’t loose you along the way.

Occasionally, I run across a poem that needs to be heard. While I think Derek’s Street Bound Sound looks damn good on the page it begs to be read aloud, mimicking all the funky scat sounds along with it. I promise: start and the thing will infect you like a pop melody.

Now, maybe you will read these poems and think they are awful abominations of the form. Perhaps you will find Rob’s poem, To Whom it May Concern preachy drivel.

I don’t. I have read it a dozen times and it still gives me shivers of pride and hope that poetry can still touch us, inform us and even shake us.

I hope these poems do the same for you. If they don’t, I humbly remind you that you didn’t have to pay $9.95 for them.

In fact, if you don’t like the poems please submit your own. We welcome all submissions and will publish good stuff. (So long as it doesn’t make us feel stupid.)

Thanks,
Ryan
ryan@smaxx.com

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