Have you always wanted to be a poet? What were your previous aspirations?
When I was little, I always thought I'd be a diplomat. I have no idea why.  It just sounded nice.  The precise, reassuring sound of the word diplomat.  Dip. lo. mat.  Then in fourth grade, a woman came into our classroom and taught a poetry unit.  Her name was Kalpana Guttman.  I remember writing about selling units of scented air, about the sound of my sister's laugh.  I remember walking home from school and stopping randomly to stare at a patch of flowers.  I don't remember what I was thinking about, just that I stopped. A desire to write was forming in my head, but it was only a vague desire until the moment I started taking the reading of poetry seriously in my teens.  Frost and Whitman were my introduction, and I fell hopelessly in love with Whitman.  I started writing then.  Part of my inclination towards writing might have come (genetically?) from my mother's side of the family. Many of them were writers and bibliophiles, and my great-grandfather was known to greet guests entering his home with a booming recitation of Edgar Lee Master's poem for Anne Rutledge: “Out of me unworthy and unknown, the Vibrations of deathless music..,” or with whole speeches from Shakespeare's plays.   At any rate, I kept writing poetry through my college years, went on to work in publishing, and then took some time off to earn my MFA.  I suppose ever since Mrs. Guttman's fourth grade poetry lessons, little by little, I've been wearing in my 'poet' shoes. Hopefully, they'll take me on a pretty long and interesting walk.
 

Do you draw inspiration from poetry alone, or do you get ideas from movies, music, and fiction as well?
Oh, I think I've been inspired by all of those things, and many others  – I'm inspired by my family, by traveling, by listening to other people's conversations. I really enjoy eating alone at cafés, and I make an effort not to tune out the conversations going on around me.  Sometimes I sit at home with a pile of poetry books and read for a long time, then run into my fiancé's office to recite one of my favorites.  I usually ramble on about how I wish I could write something like that.  And then I'll go and try.  One poem in particular was written as I was watching a documentary film about a monk.  The guy was so compelling, and I just felt like there was a whole story behind the story that wasn't being told.  So many, many things inspire me.

What are your views on the modern poetry scene—specifically the emphasis on university training as the primary route to establishing oneself as a poet?
Well, I think it's all tied up in how poetry is perceived by the general public. In “Can Poetry Matter,” Dana Gioia talks about the existence of “a large professional class for the production and reception of new poetry comprising legions of teachers, graduate students, editors, publishers, and administrators. Based mostly in universities, these groups have gradually become the primary audience for contemporary verse.”  It doesn't matter whether being established means being seen as a “legitimate” writer within and without the university sphere, or if it simply means having people (within and without) know your name and your work.  Either way, if the means to establish yourself as a poet is to work within that sphere, it makes sense that a lot of people will head that way.  Because poetry and literature matter so much to writers, of course they are going gravitate to wherever they feel literature is valued most. 

I see nothing wrong with working among people who love writing as much as you do, and after you're done with your degree, continuing to work among those people and in the service of writing. But if it's true that hardly any of our “general readers” out there read contemporary (or any) poetry, then the problem must be that contemporary poetry only circulates within that small circle, and hardly ever makes it outside.  That university training has become the primary route to establish yourself as a poet seems to be simply a result of where poetry's value and poetry's readership have migrated. 

I've heard enough people say they don't “get” poetry to wonder if the poetry itself is the problem.  Is the  problem that poetry's audience has retreated to this inner circle of poets and scholars?  Or is it that contemporary poetry has become less attractive and understandable to the general reader?  The Canadian poet Carmine Starnino writes, in an essay on Poetry Foundation's website, against the idea that “everything would be different if our stuff wasn’t so difficult, or obscure, or highbrow, or introverted, or solipsistic, or autobiographical, or experimental, or academic, or postmodern.” He goes on to say that “there is no once-popular style and subject that, if brought back, will stop poetry’s sliding poll numbers. There is no traditional link between poetry and the public that, if repaired, will turn things around. That’s because reestablishing the public’s trust in poetry would be like reestablishing the public’s trust in Latin.”

The question of why the link between poetry and the public has been (according to Starnino) all but severed invites a whole different chicken-or-egg argument. But I think it's at the heart of your original question. The emphasis on university training – the MFA -- is only part of the equation.  We all know remarkable poets who never formally studied poetry (went the university route.)  And remarkable poets who did. I don't know nearly as much as I want or should about the history of poetry, and its relationship with the “public.” I do wonder about the perception of poetry today, and whether or not we have cause to be so worried about it.  Despite how it's perceived or distributed, I don't believe that poetry will ever stop being produced.  Maybe it's just one of those things that falls in and out of public favor.  I find it really funny that over four hundred years ago, Sir Philip Sydney felt the need to “make a pitiful defense of poor poetry, which from almost the highest estimation of learning is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children.” 

What is your writing process like?
I can't work in silence, so if I'm at home I have music playing.  At a coffee shop, I'll pick the loudest, busiest one.  I need people, and life, around me.  I usually get a line or a few words dancing around my head, and I'll get it down on paper.  Then I kind of stare at it for a while.  I think of real experiences, possible experiences.  I create a story in my head, and most of the first draft of the poem happens all at once.  Sometimes, I'll go back and read poets that I love to remind myself of certain techniques, or sounds, that are particularly powerful.  I often grab a line here or there, or part of a line, from a poem I love and throw it in the mix.  That particular line might be cut out in later drafts, but it helps move things along and feed the poem.  One of my mentors, Ilya Kaminsky, was big on “stealing” from other poets, in the sense that you can, and should, borrow language, technique, form and sound from them because it's a natural part of the literary conversation – not because you can't create great work on your own.  But no matter how the poem gets formed, the seed of it for me is always a mix between a few beautiful sounding words and an image that just won't fade in my mind. 

If you became a poet of Emily Dickinson or Sylvia Plath's status, who would you want to play your character in the movie version of your life?
Wow.  I guess it would be Charlotte Gainsbourg (daughter of the famous French musician, Serge Gainsbourg).  She's got this great mix of intensity and quirkiness and quiet confidence.  Sometimes she can look very plain and masculine and other times, very delicate and feminine.  She's like a chameleon. A very elegant chameleon.

Seventeen years ago, I stood at the coffin of my husband’s father, dead at 50. Diabetes had ravaged his body:  He’d had both legs amputated below the knees, his kidneys had failed and he’d become dialysis-dependent, and his heart had quietly gone bad. When he died, he’d seemed to be improving, adapting to his prosthetics, even looking better. Yet, he slipped away in his sleep four nights after Thanksgiving.

And two years ago, in the E.R., I stood at the bedside of my husband John, then just 43, as the doctor told us despite the good results of an E.K.G., no cardiologist in his right mind would send John home because of his family history and symptoms. A nuclear stress test the next morning proved that doctor’s judgment to be impeccable. After another day, my husband lay in the cath lab, watching on a television screen as his new cardiologist shot two stents into his right coronary artery.

Later that night, a hematoma—and its excruciating pain—surged as the nurse pulled the line from his leg. Then, over the next days, weeks, and months, what nightmares do come: The near flatline. Cardiac I.C.U. Blood clots. Uncontrollable blood pressure. That fall was a blur of E.R. arrivals and hospital admissions, long days and lonely nights. Leaving the hospital once at 4 a.m., I remember driving the forty-minute trip home in the still-dark morning, praying, “How much, Lord? How much will you ask us to bear?”

The only answer I ever received was the same one the apostle Paul recorded in 2 Corinthians 12.9: “My grace is sufficient. My power is made perfect in weakness.” Indeed, for the last six years, we feel as though suffering has become a way of life, a stubborn thorn in our flesh that simply won’t let go.

Ours is the human condition. As we look around us, we don’t have to search long to find others suffering far more than we have. In the wake of Haiti’s earthquake as well as the incomprehensible growth of slavery (the second largest illegal activity, behind only drug trafficking), it’s easy to find people oppressed, abused, ravaged. And for many, such suffering continues to fuel questions about the existence of God. Neo-atheist Richard Dawkins says that the existence of suffering conclusively proves there is no God. In a Scientific American article, Dawkins comments, “The total amount of suffering per year in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. . . . In a universe of electrons and selfish genes, blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.”

Dawkins’ reasoning works perfectly well if two conditions are true: One, that suffering is all there is to this life and two, that all suffering has no value. Of course, the problem of evil is part of millennia-long philosophical and theological discourse, so I don’t want to diminish its complexity. It is hard to explain how a loving God allows suffering.

Yet, for all the talk about where evil comes from and who’s to blame, we often ignore another problem as equally troubling: the problem of goodness, the problem of beauty. If indeed, “there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference,” then how does beauty blossom in the hand of a son bringing his mother a dandelion picked from the backyard? How does goodness emanate from the husband who gets down on his hands and knees and scrubs a bathtub? Or the daughter who bakes her class cupcakes for Valentine’s Day? Or the wife who sits with her husband day after day in a hospital, sometimes until the wee hours of the night, unclasping the fingers of fear from around his neck?

Where does love come from? Can it just evolve from mere “pitiless indifference”?

And how then do we explain art? How could it appear, even over millions of years, from a universe that has “no design” and “no purpose”?

And how can it be that the making of art has also saved many a life? Gregory Orr has said, “I believe in poetry as a way of surviving the emotional chaos, spiritual confusions and traumatic events that come with being alive.” Amen. Surviving my own chaos and confusions and traumas spurred me onto poetry. It is no coincidence that my first poems were published in 2004, when a mysterious and relentlessly painful illness inhabited my body for eight months.

Of course, I can’t say I’m willing to suffer just to get a poem out of the experience. Although I may have reached the point where I do see value in my suffering, where I can say I am, indeed, a better person—a wiser, more compassionate and patient person—because I suffered, I still wouldn’t say I want to suffer. And I certainly can’t say I’d wish suffering upon anyone, even if beautiful poetry gets written as a result. Who could make such a wish?

But at the same time, perhaps, we have a limited definition of suffering, a limitation connected inextricably to another word we define badly: happiness. So often, we characterize happiness as the lack of suffering, the lack of sacrifice. Yet, in the long run, sacrifice and suffering both work to make us wiser, deeper, more sympathetic and helpful people. Might that be why so much poetry comes from poets who have suffered? Though it may certainly be true that one doesn’t have to suffer in order to produce art, it likewise is true that because of suffering, some people are able to create something beautiful.

As Scott Cairns writes in his little gem of a book, The End of Suffering, “[O]ur taking pains to make anything well could be understood, in one sense, as a consolation for things around us that appear to be poorly fashioned. . . . For the artist of any art, therefore, it is not surprising that these labors can provide a deeply satisfying consolation, giving witness to one’s own subconscious hope, one’s own implicit—avowed or disavowed—faith. . . . One might say that, in attending to such art and in answering it with substantive response, we make our hope matter.”

And this reminds me of Madeline L’Engle who once wrote that her characters pulled her by the scruff of her neck back to her faith—not the other way around. So the value of art seems inextricably connected to the value of suffering. Consolation in a broken world, yes. A sense of satisfaction. And witness to hope—not a blind, or indifferent, hope, but one that has the potential to testify to “the Father of compassion and God of all comfort” (2 Cor. 1. 2-3).

Julie L. Moore is the author of Slipping Out of Bloom, forthcoming from WordTech Editions this spring, and the chapbook, Election Day (Finishing Line Press). Moore is a Pushcart Prize nominee and recipient of the Rosine Offen Memorial Award from the Free Lunch Arts Alliance in Illinois, the Janet B. McCabe Poetry Prize from Ruminate: Faith in Literature and Art, and the Judson Jerome Poetry Scholarship from the Antioch Writers' Workshop. Moore has contributed poetry to Alaska Quarterly Review, Atlanta Review, CALYX, Chautauqua Literary Review, Cimarron Review, The MacGuffin, The Southern Review, Sou’Wester, and Valparaiso Poetry Review. She lives in Ohio where she directs the writing center at Cedarville University. Her website is www.julielmoore.com.

Julie L. Moore, the Featured Poet for Issue #1 of The Basilica Review, answers a few questions about her beginnings as a poet, who she's reading, and more.

How did you get started writing poetry?
I’ve been writing poetry since I was a kid. I used to fill spiral notebooks with stories and poems; sometimes, I’d share them with my family, but mostly, I’d just keep them in a desk drawer. One Christmas, I typed up a story for each member of my family—my mom, dad, sister Penney, and brother Paul—and gave them as gifts. I can’t remember what the stories were about, though. In eighth grade, I remember my English teacher reading an essay or story of mine out loud to the class as an example of what good writing is. We had a double classroom—it was a middle school—so there I sat, listening to my teacher read my words to fifty of my classmates. At that moment, I decided I wanted to be a writer, and I decided, too, that since I needed to pay the bills, I’d teach. 

Little did I know that teaching would become a joy—in response to a calling, really—not merely a means to earn a salary. When I went to college, then graduate school, I wrote many academic essays, of course, but took no creative writing courses because none were offered. Afterwards, as I began my teaching career at Wilberforce University, our nation’s oldest historical black liberal arts college, I experienced what all first-year teachers do: The weight of multiple lesson preps and countless papers to grade. I also had my children. So there was no time to write creatively. In fact, for the most part, I forgot all about it.

After I was hired in 1999 at Cedarville University, a colleague of mine, fairly early on, showed a documentary that she’d helped develop with her graduate advisor. The film was about Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon. I couldn’t make the showing on campus because one of my kids was sick, so my colleague let me watch it at home. I watched it alone—and it’s a good thing I did: I wept uncontrollably (and at that point in my life, I was not much of a crier!) not only over Kenyon’s death and Hall’s moving tribute to her but also over the loss of my own writing. Truly, I had an epiphany: I had told myself I’d be a writer, and there I was in my mid-thirties, doing no writing whatsoever. I think I had a bit of a mid-life crisis a little early. 

For reasons that still aren’t entirely clear to me, I didn’t focus on writing stories; I focused immediately on writing poetry. Watching the documentary, I felt like I’d found my calling. And that was a very strong impulse. But I knew I hadn’t had a creative writing course since high school, and I was embarrassed that until that day, I hadn’t even heard of Donald Hall or Jane Kenyon (and yes, I was an English professor!). Yet, going back to school wasn’t possible for me at that time. So I did the only thing I could do: I went to the library. If I couldn’t take classes in poetry, I figured I could read as much as I could get my hands on. I also knew I needed to read contemporary poets to learn what they were doing in their work and what conversations I wanted to join. So of course, I began by reading work by both Hall and Kenyon. I remember, too, that one of the first books I checked out was a collection of poems by Maxine Kumin, Selected Poems, 1960-1990. 

I never looked back. And I never quit. The impulse, the calling, is still there, as clear and strong as ever. And I direct CU’s writing center, another passion with equal joy. I feel very fortunate to have found my life’s work and that it’s so fulfilling.

Who are you reading now, and who remains a perennial favorite with you?
I read a variety of writers and poets, past and present. This past summer, for instance, I read Rilke and Rukeyser alongside poetic and nonfiction work by Jane Hirshfield, Rebecca McClanahan, Kathleen Norris, Wendell Berry, Scott Cairns, Jeff Gundy, Jeanne Murray Walker, Alison Stine, Judith H. Montgomery, Sally Rosen Kindred, and Alicia Ostriker (I was recovering from a major surgery, so I had a lot of time on my hands!). Perennial favorites include Gerard Manley Hopkins, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Frost as well as Mary Oliver, Maxine Kumin, and yes, Donald Hall, and Jane Kenyon. For me, the poets I started with have stuck with me; they’re the ones I return to over and over again.  

What sort of writing training have you had? Is it important, in your opinion, to have a writing mentor?
As I shared with my first answer, I haven’t had any formal poetry writing training at all. I have attended the Antioch Writers’ Workshop (AWW) three times in the last five years and found both the workshops and the one-on-one critiques by professional poets very beneficial. Though I would love to have a mentor, I have never had one. No one seems to have the time! Every poet I know is incredibly busy with their own teaching and writing (not to mention their families). Sometimes, I feel that I could have progressed further—and faster—if I’d had a mentor. To be honest, I still feel that way at times. So I guess I would say that yes, having a mentor is important, though I can only surmise that’s the case from my lack of one. 

Early on—and for me that’s 2002 or 2003—I remember reading Mary Oliver’s book, A Poetry Handbook. I was at a low point—I was feeling very isolated in my writing life and was doubting my ability to write anything at all of value because I didn’t have an MFA or any formal training and because no one really took my commitment to poetry seriously. And Oliver says in that book, “[T]o write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers. Perhaps they are the only teachers. I would go so far as to say that, if one must make a choice between reading or taking part in a workshop, one should read.” I was so thankful to her for saying that because that was exactly the choice I was faced with, and I had decided to read. And the poems were my mentors. 

That doesn’t mean I haven’t had any help. I have been fortunate enough to have met a few writers along the way who’ve graciously helped me by offering me feedback on my chapbook, Election Day, released by Finishing Line Press in 2006, and my first full-length book, Slipping Out of Bloom, due out in June of 2010 from WordTech Editions. Poets like Jeff Gundy, whom I met at my first AWW, and Eric Paul Shaffer, whom I met when he came to CU in 2005, in addition to my colleagues, Ryan Futrell and Kevin Heath, have all given me insightful feedback at one time or another that has helped me better my work. I’m deeply grateful to them.

How has your writing developed over the years?
It’s hard for the fish to climb out of the bowl and look at her environment from the outside in. That’s how I feel answering this question. I can’t climb outside of myself to look at my work objectively in order to analyze its development, or lack thereof. I suppose readers (what few there may be!) can do that far better than I can. But what I have noticed are things like variations in line length and movement, point of view, and voice. Lineation has become very important to me, as has extended metaphor. I’m also writing prose poems now, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart last year. That’s something I never thought I’d be able to do. But I kept studying the form and various authors’ adaptations of that form, and eventually, something just clicked, and out came this prose, sometimes narrative, sometimes richly lyrical, but all of it definitely poetic. The same thing happened with the use of second person. One day. Click. 

I like that I keep trying new things. I’ve written a lot about my own suffering—and that of my family—because that’s where our lives have been these past five years. And physical pain along with serious illness is so challenging to faith, especially in a country that seems to send the message that prosperity and good health equal happiness. I don’t think so. And I think my experiences allow me to delve into how difficult it is to endure suffering—and doubt—and somehow persevere in faith, even find joy. But I also don’t necessarily want to be known as the pain poet, or the death poet. I’ve just had another very difficult year dealing with yet more health problems, and I wrote one of my friends that I’ve discovered that there are as many genres of pain as there are of literature. She responded that I should write a poem called, “The Genres of Pain.” And I told her, no, I can’t do that; I’m beginning to bore myself! Yet, I guess that I like the fact that I’m exploring new subjects and the same time I’m writing about subjects I keep returning to—joy in the face of sorrow, faith in the grip of pain, life amid the threat of death. “Of Grief and Gift” is really all about this. But “I think of Frost this morning” is a bit of a departure for me, and I like that. My second full-length book will include these poems and more like the Frost one—a whole section of poems where I’m interacting with characters from literature like Emma and Hemingway’s Santiago and even Prufrock. That book’s working title is Scandal of Particularity, and I’m just now putting it together to send out.

What advice do you have to poets who are just starting out?
Read. Read. Read. Since I teach college composition and direct CU’s writing center, one thing that always stuns me is that I interact with students who want to write well, yet they read so little.  To repeat what Oliver says, “[T]o write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply.” T.S. Eliot said something equally important: “Wide reading...is valuable because in the process of being affected by one powerful personality after another, we cease to be dominated by anyone, or by any small number.” I think the same lesson applies for would-be poets. Read the old and the new. Read Homer. Read Virgil. Read Ovid. Read Chaucer and Milton and Shakespeare. Read the Psalms and Ecclesiastes. Read Dickinson and Whitman and Hopkins and Frost and Eliot and everyone before and after. Read work you think you won’t/don’t like. Intentionally! Read all the genres, too. And of course, read as many contemporary poets as you can because after all, you want them to read you. I liken it to a conversation. None of us likes someone who talks all the time but doesn’t listen to a word anyone else says. If you write but don’t read, you’re that person. If you want to be heard, first you must listen. 

I also think it’s also good to keep in mind that poetry isn’t just expression; it’s art. Donald Hall came to our campus several years ago and told our students that if it’s personal expression they’re after, they should keep a journal. If it’s art they’re after, they have to work at it—and revise a lot. 

So maybe the advice I’d give would be to remember the two Rs—reading and revising. Because after all, I’m also a teacher, and that makes a great mantra for freshmen in composition, too.

Mary Oliver reading at Belmont Heights Baptist Church in Nashville, Tennessee, on September 17

On Wednesday night, a friend of mine broke the news: “Mary Oliver is doing a free reading tomorrow at seven.” Previous plans were swiftly canceled, a fresh copy of Red Bird bought for autographing purposes, and a thick-lettered “MARY OLIVER NIGHT!” added to the September 17 square on my calendar.

I dressed for the reading as though dressing for a first date—knee-length skirt, two rounds of teeth-brushing, and a camera. (Okay, that last part was a joke in regard to first dates.) It was a forty-five-minute drive from my house to the reading, so we left an hour early. This was my first mistake. Never, ever assume that just because it's a poet, there'll be forty or fifty empty seats on the floor.

Mistake #2: We didn't check traffic reports before we left, and were delayed by a tractor trailer accident on the interstate. This put us about twenty minutes behind schedule, making us late for the reading.

Mistake #3: Although I was upset that we were late, I was counting on those forty or fifty empty seats, because we're going to hear a poet, not The Killers, right? Wrong. It was standing room only. The floor was full, so I perched on a short set of steps in the balcony with my camera and Moleskine notebook, in awe of just how many people had come to hear this woman read.

Me fiddling with my necklace nervously while getting a copy of Red Bird signed by Mary Oliver

Recently, I had the opportunity to see the film Julie & Julia, starring Meryl Streep and Amy Adams. The film is an adaptation based loosely off two separate books, one being Julia Child's posthumous memoir, My Life in France (2005) and the other being Julie Powell's (Julie who?) blog-turned-book-deal memoir, Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously from the same year. The first memoir is about Julia Child's experience living in France and attending the famed cooking school, Le Cordon Bleu, while the second details the project of a New York woman aspiring to cook all 524 recipes from Child's best-selling cookbook, Mastering the Art of French Cooking, in a single year.

The thing about this film that intrigued me was the fact that it is apparently the first major motion picture ever to be based off a blog. Granted, the film is based off a book that is based off a blog, but it's apparently a close enough connection to warrant the distinction. As writers, we're used to hearing things like, "If you want to be a writer, write" or some variation thereof. For years, writers haven't believed this, and in part, they've been savvy not to—writing, as we all know, not only requires practice of the craft, but talent, and not only talent, but a measure of luck. However, the blogosophere has changed that. Luck and talent are no longer non-negotiables on the path to getting published; the explosion of blogging account services in recent years has enabled anyone, literally, to become a writer.

Does the fact that there are more writers than ever today because of the Internet mean that readers now have better choices due to a competitive market? Or has the blogosphere merely added to the noise of useless information on the Internet? Does anyone really need to know what I had for breakfast today? Or does knowing what I had for breakfast today help readers relate to me better?

I think, in the end, good writing is what matters. And, for me, truthful writing is equally as important. One of Child's reported criticisms of Julie & Julia: My Year of Cooking Dangerously was that she didn't think Powell was a "serious cook." Powell agreed, claiming she didn't want to be viewed as a serious cook, but rather as a serious writer—which made some of Powell's readers bristle. After all, Powell had branded herself as something other than a "serious writer"; readers knew her as the thirty-something, experimental chef cooking her way through Child's MtAoFC as an escape from her dull job and unsatisfying marriage. It's kind of like Vivien Leigh balking at the idea of fans viewing her as Scarlett O'Hara. You're known for what you do—and sometimes, when you want to change what you do, the public won't always let you do that.

The transition of Julie Powell's project took just a handful of years to get from blog to best-selling book to major motion picture. That shift elucidates the power of the blogged word, increases the level of credibility for Internet writers, and solidifies the Internet's role in the literary world. The interesting thing about this shift is that we all have access to the same tools that Powell used to achieve success. And when everybody has the same golf club, your swing is what's most important.

Or back-to-back America’s Next Top Model marathons. Thirteen beautiful girls all used to being The Most Beautiful Girl Anyone Knows living in a house together for three months, fighting over a one hundred million dollar contract. The tears, the catfights, the gossip, the one girl every season that goes to the hospital for something or other. The Jay’s—Mr. Jay with his white frosted treasure-troll hair, Miss Jay with his model walk. And, of course, Tyra—Smile with your eyes.

By the time I got into season five, I found myself identifying with the girls on  America’s Next Top Model. Not in the six foot tall, size zero, gorgeous way, or living with thirteen girls (though it does bring me back to the tear-each-other’s-hair-out teenage years I had with my sisters). It’s the critique. As a graduate of an M.F.A. program, I can more than relate to critique.

I believe that aspiring poets have more in common with these aspiring models than the Oxygen channel might think. Poets can be competitive like you wouldn’t believe (who hasn’t been in a competitive workshop at some point?). We can be insecure, dramatic, bent on “stardom.” In some ways, America’s Next Top Poet would have ANTM beat—rather than one “crazy” girl, you’d have a whole cast of crazy girls—all the stereotypical writer problems could be represented in just two or three poets—Raymond Carver-esque drinking, Robert Lowell's brand of crazy,  Sylvia Plath-like suicidal tendencies.

Though that, and the fact that poets aren’t renown for being the most attractive lot of people, is where America’s Next Top Model has us beat. Most young poets simply can’t handle rejection and critique as healthily as young models. While the models might cry, gossip, dance on tables, poets as a group are historically infamous for turning to drugs, drink, or worse. The judges wouldn’t have much eliminating to do the way modern poets tend to eliminate themselves.

I think that we poets should take some ideas from how models handle critique. Critique is hard—poetry is a personal art, making it hard not to take criticism personally. But in any artistic field, the more you put yourself out there, the more you’re going to be told that you're poetry is bad, plain and simple. Like modeling, poetry is competitive and the poets that have been in it awhile aren’t going to encourage you to delve into a no-pay, little-recognition field like poetry if you don’t have what it takes. On the other hand, if you believe you have what it takes and are willing to work hard, then I think you’re what Tyra would call “fierce”—just be prepared for people to disagree with you for a while.

Why should we let critique destroy us? In some ways we have it so much easier than those skinny girls trying to get into modeling—if someone says their body is all wrong, their body is all wrong and there’s nothing outside surgery that’s going to fix that. If we hear in a critique that our poem is trash, so what? Learn why its bad, and either turn it around or write a new poem. Really, shouldn’t we be the ones dancing on tables?

So I don’t see America’s Next Top Poet coming on the air any time soon. In the meantime, I do have those America’s Next Top Model critiques to watch with all their “you’re personality is boring,” or “you’re body is all wrong.” And critique is fun to listen to when its not you in the hot-seat. My poetry might be “lame” sometimes but at least I don’t have to hear that while I’m wearing a bikini.