It is very timely that during Mean Week, The Northville Review‘s Poetry for Poetry Haters issue has gone live. Northville editor Erin Fitzgerald interviewed the issue’s guest editor Whitney Freemesser who explains why she hates poetry.

Why do you hate poetry?
I don’t like frou-frou OH SO DEEP descriptions of things. If something is black, say it is black. Don’t say it’s inky jet ebony.

As people who received a rejection slip for this issue discovered, you do actually like some poetry. The example we gave out was Richard Brautigan’s At the California Institute of Technology. Can you talk a little bit about why you do like this poem, and maybe name some others?
I like it because it’s simple and not overwrought with emotion. We don’t have to listen to lines and lines of the same sentiment repeated thirteen different ways. As for other poems that I like, I like most of Brautigan’s work. Also, there’s a poetry anthology called “Pictures That Storm Inside My Head”, edited by Richard Peck. I like the title poem from that one, though I don’t remember who wrote it.

Do you think that eliminating repetitive and overwrought elements might be the key to getting people to actually like poetry?
Well, it would make ME like poetry a lot more. But I’m not the usual poetry audience. I don’t have the time/energy/patience to listen to it. It’s like listening to my son try to tell a story – it takes him a few tries to get started, so he’ll repeat the same phrase over and over – and I just want to yell “GET TO THE POINT ALREADY!” And then it’ll turn out to be something about Wii Sports Resort or Phineas and Ferb.

Read more of this interview here and enjoy poetry from Ryan Bradley, Cristin O’Keefe Aptowicz, Howie Good and Daniel Romo.

Chris Higgs’ post schooled me on the proper use of the apostrophe after singular nouns that end in ‘s’ to show possession, so I figured I’d post my own grammar lesson.

From The OWL@Purdue:

Note: The choice of article is actually based upon the phonetic (sound) quality of the first letter in a word, not on the orthographic (written) representation of the letter. If the first letter makes a vowel-type sound, you use “an”; if the first letter would make a consonant-type sound, you use “a.” So, if you consider the rule from a phonetic perspective, there aren’t any exceptions. Since the ‘h’ hasn’t any phonetic representation, no audible sound, in the first exception, the sound that follows the article is a vowel; consequently, ‘an’ is used. In the second exception, the word-initial ‘y’ sound (unicorn) is actually a glide [j] phonetically, which has consonantal properties; consequently, it is treated as a consonant, requiring ‘a’.

Folks, please do not write the article ‘a’ before the acronym ‘MFA.’ If you do that, then I will think you went to a low-ranked MFA program. Not your fault, though; you didn’t know any better. If you’d rather not worry about the a/an thing, you’re perfectly welcome to write out in full that you received a Master of Fine Arts, as I will do when I apply for a job at Half Price Books this Spring once my contract is up at the university.

Or you can just skip over the whole confusing mess and either a) study writing on your own and save yourself lots of money/stress or b) get a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing, thus making all MFAers on the job market collectively shit themselves. Phhhhddddd.