Poetic Blunders

For today’s Daily Create I’ve been tasked to write a poem about a mistake I’ve made. Instead, I’ll write about a mistake I made in a poem.

I was taking a creative writing course and I didn’t like my professor. Worse, I was harboring low-level contempt. I don’t really remember why – but I remember she shared a book that she’d published that sounded awful. I assumed she’d received some accolades only because the can-con pool is so small. [Side note: though I remembered the book inaccurately – I remembered a title that didn’t exist, and I incorrectly remembered it as poetry – I was still able to find her immediately with the title as search terms. Memory is weird!]

Regardless, I wrote a poem for one assignment, and I was immensely proud of it. I’d agonized over it, spent hours with a thesaurus, and it was perfect. The metre was beyond anything I’d done before. And then when it came time to read it out loud, she stopped me. I was pronouncing buffet (as in wind buffeting) as buffet (as in all-you-can-eat). The rhyme scheme depended on it, and there was no way out. She provided a couple of suggestions but I hated them. Later, I went back and tried to fix it, but it wouldn’t work.

Something died that day. And I’ve seen this play out again with some of my students, so hard and inflexible and unforgiving in their youth. They design something with such a hard shell – the lines are so definite, the work is so complete – that any unexpected shortcoming kills the whole thing. They can’t compromise, the darling was meant to be all-or-nothing. It would be easier to slip into a parallel universe where buffet was pronounced buffay.