22 November 2004. At New-Poetry one of the participants slammed some poet for "self-parody," a standard crticial term third-rate critics use against big-reputation poets they don't like. That got me thinking about intentional self-parody, which I vaguely recall trying once, unsuccessfully. It seems like a terrific exercise for serious poets, though, so I started thinking about how I'd parody myself. As I remarked in an e.mail to Michael Snider after he'd said something about the difficulty of writing serious self-parody, "Yeah, I was thinking about that. You'd have to know what all your dumbest mannerisms were, but if you did, you wouldn't be using them! The more I think about it, though, the more I think how valuable it would be for a serious poet to try to do a parody of his poetry. I think he'd learn a huge amount in the process."

It struck me that I probably could do a pretty good job parodying my Poem poems. In fact, I think most of my rough drafts of Poem poems are parodies for I try to push my devices--mainly neologizing, using one part of speech for another, infraverbality, and surrealism--to extremes. Then I revise them down to better sense. And the Poem poems are almost always romantically sardonic, which should be easy enough to parody. A possible parody immediately suggested itself, but then it as quickly turned into a possibly serious poem as I thought about it. So, two days ago, I began writing it, wondering where it would go. I thought I'd post it as my blog entry for that day. I only got three lines done, though:

Poem Meets His Double

Murked in his too ophenedness, inware 
only, if that, Poem
spingled lamely into 

Poem Meets His Double

Murked in his too offennedness, inware 
only, if that, Poem
lingled lamefully intrue underestness.
The craternal just-audible billow of 
the near-sightedness of the rocks above him
had no effect on him, nor
did the fiersh odors of the pre-skyed
grass, weeds and flowers more than blink a moment
or two into his nearrowing,
colorlessingly.

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