A Poet's Credo

This credo I hereby affirm. I will never say marginalize or use privilege as a verb. I will avoid closure except perhaps when discussing the endings of poems. I will avoid gnostic altogether. I will not say societal and comedic where social and comic will serve just as well. I will not say hegemony except with irony. I will not put nestled, cradled, or shimmered in poems, and I will stop reading any poem that has cupped in it, or scrim, sure signs of poetical intent. I will not split infinitives if I can help it. I will use correct grammar, but I will feel free to leave out punctuation marks when it suits my purposes in a poem. I will welcome new oxymorons, as when a friend complains that she has “an ancient computer.” I will allow no-brainer and Prozac and feng shui into my poetry, not to mention the Net, the Web, the Windows software that came with the box, my laptop, my desktop, my ergonomic workstation, the bad case of carpal tunnel syndrome I suffered a few years ago, and other things that would have made no sense to anyone thirty years ago. I will love the language as a living thing that never stops evolving.

DAVID LEHMAN