What Poets Do

I don't use the Fucking Your Sister letter as an assignment to critique, I use it as an assignment to provoke discussion. What was hard about the assignment? I get a variety of answers, but generally they're along these lines; It was about emotions that were painful. It was hard to imagine myself in that situation. I didn't know what to start with. I had a hard time fitting it all in, or putting it together. I didn't know why I would be telling all this to this person I hadn't talked to in a long time.

And what was fun about it? I got to use my imagination. It was a challenge. It has...no one actually ever says this in my class, but I think that's because they're scared of me at that point...it has all that neat stuff like sex and death and forbidden desires. Anyway, whatever they come up with, I can turn into my object lesson...this is what poets do. They have to reach deep into themselves for emotions they may not be comfortable with. They have to find words for those emotions, and organize them. But they get to exercise their imagination, and write about all that neat stuff.