How to Discourage Your Poet

The Disciple - A prose poem by Oscar Wilde - Prose & Poetry

[Thanks to Deb for inadvertently giving me the idea. Happy Thanksgiving, one and all!]

Hide their rhyming dictionary.

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Avoid inspiring them. Keep them away from clouds, Grecian urns and especially flammable tigers.

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Get a doctor’s note. “Sorry sweetheart, but I can’t listen to your poetry, today. Doctor says one more rhyme might kill me”

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Keep it a two-way street… bargain: Say, “I’ll listen to your poetry if you’ll let me kill your dog with a hammer”

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You can’t read a poem without light. Don’t pay your electric bill. If they start reading to you during the day, interrupt with the news that you saw a Grecian urn out back. This will put him into what psychologists call “ode mode”.

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If the poetry is free-verse, pretend you think the poet is just having a conversation with you and interrupt. T. S. Eliot’s wife had great success with this. “Yes, April IS a pretty cruel month. Now, let me tell you about what happened to me at the office today”

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Tell them, “The odds of you becoming a successful poet are a thousand to one”. Your poet won’t feel any better but YOU’LL be well on your way to becoming a statistician.

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Remember that you can get a ball-gag off of Amazon for less than twelve dollars.

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When they try to talk, turn your radio up to eleven. You see, most radios only go up to ten… but MINE goes up to eleven. That’s one louder.

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Pretend you cannot see or hear him. He’ll assume he’s fallen into a parallel dimension and then rush off to write a poem about it…

19 thoughts on “How to Discourage Your Poet”

  1. Ok, funny but how the hell did I inspire it??? PS you forgot smash a stained glass window over his head, he’ll think inspiration has struck and run off to milk a cow

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