21 Recommended Poetry Repairs by Firepoem Tires
(a manifesto by Rob Carney, Scott Poole, and Jessy Randall)
New Most-Likely-Tos
by Kate Northrop and Jessy Randall
Most likely to develop a fondness for tearing exactly along the edge of perforations
Most likely to pull over, most likely to use the word frisky, most likely to eat full-fat yogurt
Most likely to recount last night’s dream
Most likely to fill the house with tchotchkes of a certain animal: cow things, pig things, peacocks, beagles
Most likely to stand at the edge of roofs, most likely to insist on skinny-dipping in the pond
Most likely to break a thing –soap dish, towel rack— and yell at the dog, most likely to feel the urge to fall apart, the sunlight refusing
Most likely to talk enthusiastically of canning vegetables and/or previous addictive behavior
Most likely to trace his own face, in secret, with a found feather
Most likely to say, at least once, when settling into a car and buckling the seatbelt bloop bloop bloop
Most likely to like the smell of a cellar, or cigarette smoke, or cedar
Most likely to recommend meditation, most likely to sit next to you at dinner, most likely to email you afterward
Most likely to compliment your haircut
Most likely, in early morning, on a bike ride on a beach road, to cry out-loud I want to fuck this air!
Most likely to invoke Bartleby, the Scrivener
Most likely to bury her face in a handful of basil
Rules of the Writing Colony Secret Game
by Kate Northrop and Jessy Randall*
Stay up so late it's like you're drunk
Find yourself wanting
Two minutes in the closet
will be uncomfortable
Burst into tears
Spend the night in someone else's cabin
by yourself
If you have seat warmers in your car
you are automatically excluded
or if you are tall
When all wishes are fulfilled,
come up with new, unfulfillable
wishes
*this game is not related to the secret game supposedly played at Yaddo and MacDowell about which we know nothing
Rob Carney is the author of The Book of Sharks (Black Lawrence, 2018) and 88 Maps (Lost Horse, 2015, a finalist for the Washington State Book Award). In 2014 he received the Robinson Jeffers/Tor House Foundation Award for Poetry.
Kate Northrop is the author of Clean (Persea, 2011) and Things are Disappearing Here (Persea, 2007, a New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice and a finalist for the Academy of American Poets’ James Laughlin Award).
Scott Poole is the author of Hiding from Salesmen (Lost Horse, 2011) and The Cheap Seats (Lost Horse, 1998). He was the founding director of Wordstock, the Portland, Oregon, book festival.
Jessy Randall is the author of How to Tell If You Are Human: Diagram Poems (Pleiades, 2018) and A Day in Boyland (Ghost Road, 2007, a finalist for the Colorado Book Award).