Charles Harper Webb

THE SECRET OF MY SUCCESS   

            “I hate when poets say, My poems write themselves.” 

                        —Overheard 

 

After years of marching when I order, “March,” and hurtling into hails of critics’ lead when I yell, “Charge,” my poems plop down by a brook in a mountain meadow and won’t budge.

“Change your titles,” Epithalamion shouts. “They suck the mop.” 

“It’s like you have a thousand kids named Enuresis,” Poem brays. 

“Worse than that!” pipes Meditation from the rear.  

I work them over—sap and brass knucks—for a week, then hire an editor from the hardboiled avant-garde. “A Fleeting Thought” becomes “Galoshes for My Nose.” “Composed After Long Grieving” becomes “Decomposed After Long Heaving.” 

“Let’s go,” I yell. “We’ve got landscapes to describe using scholarly allusions and words like crinkum-crankum with superb mouth-feel. We’ve got family contretemps and social inequities that, boxed in loose hexameter, will win us grants and get us in Morton’s Anthology.”

My poems double-time forward but stop outside a store in which the sales staff—all Scottish terriers—sell nothing but popped Valentine balloons. 

“We hate where you send us,” the poems whine. “We want to go where we want to go.”

I cyanide their rations and phosgene whole manuscripts, to no avail. My “Variations on a Coffee Stain in the New Yorker” turns into “Damp Jemima,” a lament that home-made pancakes never taste as good as the restaurant kind. My saga “Wittgenstein” re-invents itself as a haiku on sumo wrestling, “The Great Fatsby.”

“Armies have discipline,” I rage. “You’re a mob. A rout of savages. A murder of iambs!” Finally, though, like a parent whose kids, despite Bach in the bassinet, Cotillion, and ten years of charm school, become crack-whores, stoat-swallowers, and dog phrenologists, I tell my poems, “You’re on your own. I quit.” 
 

from The Elephant of Surprise, published by Moon Tide Press., © 2026 by Charles Harper Webb.