Advice for an angry poet

Bet he'd like Bukowski. Doubt it'd help his writing though.

Tell him not to write when angry. And if he won't read other poets, why should anyone read him?

Ginsburg might appeal to him, while showing him a thing or two about craft. How does he tend to express this rage - iow, does he have a typical theme or imagery? What's he so mad about?

race.

He is raging about race.

I have tried to explain that his work needs to be something other than angry but he is unapologetic. He is confident in his rage.

Nikki Giovanni would seem an obvious suggestion then. Yusef Komunyakaa, who I wouldn't identify as angry, deals with race and is quite accomplished.

Dylan Thomas. When he's raging, he's brilliant.

What I said about Yusef applies to Jay Wright too.

Hmmm... what's his class background? (His parents, I mean, I know what Harvard is despite my penchant for nudity.)

Dude grew up on welfare.

But he swears any achievements he made by himself with no help from anyone.

He's not too sentimental this dude.

But he is very good at rage.

Paul Beatty
Reg E. Gaines
Langston Hughes/Gwendolyn Brooks
Don L. Lee
the slam poetry anthology called Aloud!

Poor, eh? And race is still the ONLY focus of his rage? You sure? Didn't he know any poor white trash? Damn, they really do keep the po whites and the po blacks apart, don't they?

He's got a lot of reading to catch up on.

Briefly, his rage comes from what he considers the big lie.

Work hard. Study. Go to medical school, become a doctor and you will be in.

Instead he walks in the room and his patients assume he is the orderly. Other doctors treat him....

His manuscript is titled, "Still Just a Nigger"

As I said, he has lots of rage. And lots of reading to catch up on.

Seems to me the man should be allowed some rage, even if it doesn't improve his poetry. The chances appear good that he has to shovel away some rage before he can locate some of the more nuanced feelings and perceptions that would inform a more nuanced poetry.

Rather than encourage him to move away from his rage as his subject and motivation (no use - it has too strong a gravitational field), I'd focus on what he wants the reader to know or to feel after reading his poem(s). Tell him that narcissism is not literature. Literature either moves, informs or delights the reader.

To the reader, who is a stranger to him, it matters little how powerful his experience is or his feelings are within him, if their expression doesn't deliver much on the receiving end. It may be good therapy for him - but presumably he wants more than that: he wants readers.

Introduce him to the idea that, while he should listen to his rage as it pours out in words (because that gives the words truth, power, and conviction), there is a further step he needs to master, a craft of editing and reshaping that raw stuff into a form that serves readers. To learn that craft, he has to be a reader. Moreover, he has to be a critical reader, who closely examines his own reading experience, and through that examination pulls himself closer and closer to being a real poet, not a prodigious ranter.

Don't be shy about giving him a thorough reading of his ms. in terms of what works and what doesn't work for you as a reader (not as a teacher or a critic). Don't tell him how to fix it. Just point to where it is broken and simply say this didn't work for me.

But what is far more valuable to him at this stage is to pick out the lines or phrases or single words that do work for you. Lift them out of the ruck and praise them, so he will learn better to see the valuable bits and pluck them out himself. Furthermore, it validates for him that his efforts do have value, if only here and there, and he will, of his own accord begin to pare away and discard (or rethink) the lesser parts that fail.

If he really wants to write better poetry, it will be exciting to watch him improve. If he just wants adulation or therapy, let him rest content with that and realize he'll never make a poet. Few do.

Don't you just hate wannabe poets who NEVER READ POETRY???? I will NEVER understand this. Tho' I have have many such in various classes. If he wants to write poetry, he must love it enuf to read some.

PS Great advice from Aimless et.al.