Tipton, James

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feeling envious of and sorry for Billy Wheeler, who had to read the exercise out loud in class.The funniest word that all of us had discovered was shittim.I can't remember what it means now, and while writingthis poemI have tried to find it, unsuccessfully, in my new Penguin English Dictionary.Which brings me to my subject, my new dictionary.It has the words we looked for that were never there. Dramatic Breakthrough in Lexicography —  I can imagine some pedant pronouncing, while smacking his lips over cunt.But these words must be less exciting for kids nowadays when even a dictionary has them,and if they read modern poetry they're well used to seeing them all without even asterisks.My new dictionary seems to have all of the four-letterwords,and the curious thing is I came across them by chance without even bothering to look;and I don't know whether I'm glad they’re included or not, as there goes still another link with my childhood.The one consolation is the funny definition of fuck which applies the word to males only: "(of males).Now what do you make of the bloke who wrote that definition? What do you suppose his wife is doing while he fucks her, having intimate carnal knowledge of her husband?—  Knute SkinnerKilshanny, Co. Clare, IrelandWhy Some People Write:Rabbits, Women1Suffering from an attack at nineteen of wisdom, I began collecting poems, initially, poems about the poor, or poems for peace, love, or exposing.2After I accidentally drove over a rabbit on the way home from a dance, I began collecting poems about killing33things with cars: deer, purple ducks, a cow in Indiana, a row of skunks, the ghost of Dido in a dark fog.3Finally I forgot the rabbit, began to read poems about women, read them as others read Playboy; poems about female poets, about female parts, about coeds in a union of students.I even added a few artistic nudes to my desires, but they never quite stacked up against my poems.4I didn't forget the women poems, but I was forever losing them, soiling them, finding them behind the toilet, stuck on the bottom of my bathtub, open on my office desk; so,I decided to collect poems I didn't understand.5Consequently I've cancelled Harper’s, Saturday Review, and N.Y.R.B., and now subscribe (not a single one run by a university) to twenty-seven little magazines.Not much, but better than nothing. Therefore,I have become a poet.December on the FloorIf one says absurd or sexy things he might become successful as a poet. Last week I made love to the Queen's butter­fly (note line break) but the monarch didn't like it;but if one says he is sitting at his mother-in-law's eating a swiss cheese

Why Some People Write: Rabbits, Women

http://ddd.uab.cat/pub/wormwood/wormwood_a1969v9n4i36/wormwood_a1969v9n4i36p33.pdf

Why Some People Write: Rabbits, Women

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