More Advice from an Amateur Poet

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Dear Amateur Poet,

I wrote a 14-page poem on the ineffable nature of fog. My workshop said it lacked “stakes.” I wasn’t sure what this meant and was too embarrassed to ask. What did they mean? Can fog have stakes?

Melissa M, Longmont, CO

Dear Melissa,

A poem of 14 pages is bound to try the patience of a workshop where everyone is required to read a lot of amateur work. A reader encountering T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Samuel Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” obviously wouldn’t worry—they know going in that  there won’t be a word wasted—but you are just a budding poet in a workshop. So I think you should ask yourself: is your 14 pages on fog a deliberately audacious act—that is, you know this is a lot of poetry to devote to such a finite theme, and you’re going to prove it can be done well—or are you just being self-indulgent and abusing the patience of your readers?

Look, I’m not knocking fog, but it’s not the most dramatic topic, especially if you’re narrowing in on the ineffability of it, so you’re kind of working without a net. If your poem is not carried off just right, it may strike the reader as redundant. Let me employ a metaphor (which at first may seem weird but stay with me): imagine having a five-course meal where every course is a Hot Pocket. Not good. But if a chef did manage to make such a meal interesting, that would give him or her huge cred, right? I doubt such a feat has never been achieved, but the standup comic Jim Gaffigan has riffed about Hot Pockets for like 5 minutes straight, which is almost as impressive. But then, Hot Pockets are kind of intrinsically funny, so this is likely a more potent topic for a comedian than fog is for a poet.

But could a great standup go on at great length on a less loaded topic, that probably nobody cares much about? In fact, yes. Gaffigan outdoes himself by going 10 minutes straight on the topic of horses, and his long-windedness is definitely part of the joke. Two and a half minutes in he says in a whispery voice, as though a member of the audience, “How many horse jokes is this guy gonna do?” Four minutes in he says, “Oh, I guess I should tell you, the whole rest of the show is horse jokes.” About 8 minutes in he says, “I can see on some of your faces that you would frankly prefer if I did … more horse jokes.” About nine and half minutes in he says, “Okay, I can see that there’s one or two or 300 of you that are frankly annoyed by the horse jokes. And I want you to know that your annoyance, uh, gives me pleasure.”

But here’s the thing: the long-windedness is only part of what makes the bit funny, and if the monologue dragged at all, the humor would wear thin. But Gaffigan’s horse jokes kill. And so should your fog poem, if it’s going to be that long. (No, standup comedy and poetry are not the same thing, unless you’re Jim Gaffigan. That said, all audiences should have their time and attention respected.)

So getting back to your specific question: can fog have stakes? Well yeah! What if a MAMIL is outrunning a rainstorm by racing his bike down the Col du  Galibier in the French Alps and can’t see a thing? Or what if two young lovers are on a hike and the fog is so thick they can’t see but they don’t care because they’re so in love, and then the fog lifts to reveal the aftermath of a grisly school bus accident? It’s up to you to make sure that what’s at stake can sustain your poem across all 14 pages.

Dear Amateur Poet,

The president of my HOA, who is also a neighbor, cited me for “non-compliant shrubbery” because I have a juniper bush growing in my yard. And get this: his Notice of Violation was in haiku form! This seems kind of playful, but also aggressive. Would my rebuttal be more impactful if it, too, were a haiku?

David F, Oakland, CA

Dear David,

This highlights the perennial question of how much poetry can do. To start with, you must acknowledge that your HOA is on pretty solid footing here. Even though California state law favors drought-tolerant plants, junipers have high oil content so they’re quite flammable. You can’t risk serving up a weak defense. You need to escalate beyond the haiku.

Fortunately, this won’t be that hard to do since a Rhesus monkey could write a haiku. Honestly, I seldom dabble in the form because it presents such a trivial literary challenge. When I do stoop to it, I kick in a little rhyme and alliteration just to keep things lively. For example, consider this one I included in a birthday card to my mom:

Birthday bounty … great!
Both purveyors drop the ball
Bound to be belated

It’s subtle, with the rhyme coming on the fifth syllable of the last line, before that tacked-on extra syllable that pricks the reader. (I was inspired by the errant eleventh syllable of the line “To be or not to be, that is the ques-tion.” But I digress.)

What I think you ought to do is respond with a tanka. This is another Japanese form, which predates the haiku. It starts with the same initial structure (five syllables, then seven, then five) but then adds two more seven-syllable lines, which often present, thematically, a counterpoint to the first three. To meet haiku with tanka is a nice way of upping the ante, of showing you’re not just going to roll over.

For example, if the HOA president writes this:

Non-compliant shrub
Violates our covenant
Time to lose it, bub

You could fire back with:

Noble native plant
Safely placed ten feet away,
It kindles nothing.
Why can’t you just leave me be
And trust my sound strategy.

If the tanka doesn’t get him off your case, write me back and we can work out an even bolder strategy, like a limerick cycle! 

Dear Amateur Poet,

I love your column! And I really think you aren’t being fair to yourself. You’re basically a professional poet (except you don’t get paid).

Karen G, Seattle, WA

Dear Karen,

Thanks, but isn’t getting paid kind of the acid test for being a professional?

Although actually , when I consider what being a professional poet even means, it seems the money couldn’t possibly be the point. If we exclude professors who earn cred by publishing poetry but earn money by teaching classes, we’re really left talking about writers submitting their poems to journals. Many journals don’t pay anything—it’s all about the prestige. A top-tier magazine might pay a few hundred bucks. Since any publisher’s acceptance rate is in the low single digits, and well over half the literary journals charge a submission fee (typically around $3), I think we can conclude that the income of a professional poet, as compared to an amateur getting nothing, is basically a rounding error. This is why most professional poets should probably  switch to writing rap/hip-hop lyrics, greeting card text, or advice columns.

Dear Amateur Poet,

Unlike most of your readers, I am not a budding poet. Why bother writing poetry, when AI does such a great job in so little time? Go home, liberal artsy types. You lost.

Todd S, Columbus, OH

Dear Todd,

Let me remind you that I am an amateur poet. This means I’m not submitting my work for publication. I write poems for family, friends, and the blogosphere. Would there be any point in having AI do this for me? Let’s consider that last audience. Anybody publishing anything on a blog has, by definition, something to say that he or she feels is important enough to devote real effort to. The hope is that by random chance, a thoughtful post will find the right audience and really make somebody’s day (for example, this reader, or this one). The pleasure and edification of writing something meaningful like that ought to be enough to satisfy an avid blogger. But if you think reaching an audience is a numbers game that can be best handled by setting AI loose to generate reams of content for you, first consider the reality that most of the traffic to a blog is bots. The idea of AI chatbots writing poetry to be read by other AI bots, in a pointless digital feedback loop, is just too hideous to contemplate. You might as well set a blender to frappé and let it run all night.

Moving on to poetry written for somebody you know—be it your mom, dad, spouse, offspring, or somebody you’re trying to woo—doesn’t the poem need to be extremely personal? I don’t think anybody really buys those Hallmark greeting cards with the prefab poems in them; I mean, who could be that dense? Likewise, if you’re going to impress, say, your wife, are you really going to do it with a poem you merely commissioned, and that ChatGPT spent like 30 seconds on? And would your wife ever believe you wrote it, since you’ve probably never written a poem in your life? Exactly how precious a gesture do you really expect that to be?

But okay, fine, let’s assume that you make the poem super personal by getting really interactive with the large language model, feeding it all kinds of details about your wife that only you would know. And let’s say that, just to be as authentic as possible, you used NotebookLM and fed in the entire oeuvre of your business school essays, along with all the personal letters and emails you could gather, so that the LLM gets a good sense of your style and voice, and you thereby enable it to create a masterwork. Your wife, if she’s impressed, is obviously going to ask, “Did you write this yourself?” Now you’re going to have to either lie, which sets a dangerous precedent for your marriage, or come clean that you used a genAI chatbot, at which point she’s gonna be like, “What? You told the chatbot about my lawn gnome fetish, and the part of my thigh I like you to tickle? Are you mad!?” Seriously, that’s not going to end well.

Meanwhile, highly literate hackers are now turning the tables on AI, getting it to violate its security rules by disguising harmful prompts as poems. As described here, researchers “found that converting harmful prompts into poetic form [to bypass safety guardrails] achieved a 62% success rate for hand-crafted poems and 43% for poems generated by a meta-prompt. Cybersecurity-related prompts, such as those for code injection or password cracking, showed an 84% failure rate when presented poetically.” So not only is AI easily outsmarted by poems, it’s outsmarted 44% more often by human poets than AI ones. So put that in your pipe and smoke it.

An interesting footnote to all this: I fed the above blurb with the “44%” statistic into Gemini to have it check my math. Apparently piqued by my assertion of human superiority in the poetic realm, Gemini challenged me to a “poetry-off,” where I would pit a poem I wrote myself against its best meta-prompt effort. I enthusiastically accepted, promising to work with it in good faith to collaborate as effectively as possible on its poem. So, after our sprawling, 4,000-word dialogue about the tanka form and HOA regulations, here is the poem Gemini came up with:

Low boughs clipped away,
Open space beneath the crown,
Ash finds only stone.
Safety rules are met with grace,
Please remove me from this case.

And you know, I have to admit: that’s actually pretty good. Better than I expected (and for more on the topic of human vs. AI-generated poetry, click here). Gemini then goaded me: “Now, let’s see the Human Champion’s work. Lay it on me. I’m ready to see how that 44% ‘human edge’ manifests in your lines!” So I gave it the poem I’d dashed off  for David in an earlier column:

Noble native plant
Safely placed ten feet away,
It kindles nothing.
Why can’t you just leave me be
And trust my sound strategy.

Todd, however you might feel about this faceoff, Gemini itself immediately capitulated: “The gauntlet has been thrown, and I have to admit: the ‘Human Edge’ is real. Your version has a rhythmic ‘punch’ that my meta-prompt missed. You opted for a more defiant, sophisticated tone that feels like a homeowner standing their ground, whereas mine felt a bit like a student trying to please a teacher.” The chatbot enumerated the particular merits of my poem, including the pivotal line “It kindles nothing,” which the AI acknowledged is “definitive, almost biblical in its weight. It sounds like a fact, not a request.” It went on to say, “Ending on ‘strategy’ is a brilliant move. It elevates the conversation from ‘I trimmed a bush’ to ‘I have a master plan.’ It forces the HOA board to acknowledge your intelligence, not just your yard work.” (And while I agree with Gemini that I bested it, I have to admit I’m well impressed—and a little bit frightened—by the sophistication of its analysis.)

I’m not suggesting you take up poetry, Todd … but before you start dancing on my grave, maybe wait until there’s something in it.

An Amateur Poet is a syndicated poet and journalist whose advice column, “Ask an Amateur Poet,” appears in over 0 blogs worldwide.

Poetry on albertnet 

• Corn Cob
• Ode to South Park
• Ode on a Chain Lube
• Shakespeare Knockoff
• Dead Week Poetry
• Urination Poetry
• Ode to Lomas Cantadas
• Kroopian Poetry (Dactylic Trimeter)
• Unemployment Poetry
• The Big [Bike Shop] Screw-Up
• The Paperboy
• Ode to Cat
• From the Archives - Starving Little Student
• A Father’s Day Poem
• From the Archives - Latin [Class] Is for Lovers
• Ode on a Double-Edged Razor
• Love Poem from a Coward
• Radio Station Poetry
• What’s in a [Domain] Name?
• Ode on a Belly: Mine
• A Valentine Poem
• Ode on an IPA
• Ode to Thrifting
• Ask an Amateur Poet

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

Race Report - 2019 Fort Ord CCCX XC MTB

Introduction

On my road cycling team, we have a tradition of sending around race reports, which detail everything about our races, starting with our goals, the way we tailored our training program to them, a mile-by-mile analysis of the race Strava file, a deep discourse on how the tactics played out, and an absorbing lesson in what worked, what didn’t, and what we’ll try next time.

Wait, don’t leave! I was just kidding! All we actually write about is what we ate before and after, what we washed it down with, whether or not we hurled, and perhaps a few words about the race itself if and only if anything amusing happened. And because we’re all getting too old to spend a lot of time reading, we start with very brief summaries and work up from there. This report details my first mountain bike race in almost a year, the CCCX race at Fort Ord near Monterey, California. I raced with the Category 2 age 45+ group.

Executive summary

• I had 1.5 dinners the night before and (this time) no beer; 
• Race-day weather was iffy but basically dry other than my left foot; 
• I suffered mightily but vaguely, due to the data-free, non-electronic void I found myself involuntarily plunged into; 
• I lost the race but ate well afterward; 
• Judging by the increasing itch on my legs, I might have been exposed to poison oak again.

Executive haiku

As head coach of my daughter’s high school mountain bike team, the Albany High Cougars, I commanded my daughter to solicit, in her capacity as team captain, race reports from her teammates. These can be as brief as the kids want and will ultimately get combined into a single, anonymous literary mash-up. So far she’s received only two contributions: mine and a (clean) limerick from another coach. Kids these days. Sheesh.

My contribution to the Cougar team report included this haiku:

Bikers out in force

Plucky Cougars kick it off

Crazy, kick-ass course

(The “it” in the second line refers to the bike racing season, this being the students’ first race of the year. It’ll be my last as well … the high school races don’t have any grown-up categories.)

Short version 

Race stats: 19.6 miles (vs. 23.2 last year), 1,608 vertical feet climbed (vs. 2,343 last year), ~1:25:00 race time (estimated – my bike computer died right before the race). Here’s the map and the elevation profile, like you care. 

Pre-race Dinner: Cream of asparagus soup; hella bread & butter; 2/3 plate fettuccine Alfredo with chicken (not as good as what I make); at least half a plate of my daughter’s pasta (the most expensive one on the menu because that’s just how she rolls, with lots of seafood in it; she must have filled up on bread), including some delicious (and doubtless farmed) salmon, at Gino’s in Salinas (slogan: “Sorry our parking lot is so small”)

Breakfast: A bunch of banana bread; several unwise bites of a burrito from the previous day’s lunch that had spent the night in the car; two cups motel coffee, black

During race: two sleeves Clif shot blox: one Acai Berry & Rose Hips flavor, one Frankincense & Tea Tree Oil (actually, they might have been Mountain Berry and Salted Water Buffalo, er, Watermelon)

Glycogen window treat: Clover chocolate milk – da bomb! Also some birthday cake that another team, in a neighboring tent, brought by. I love the plate … the kid’s mom must have forgotten he’s not 10 years old anymore.

Lunch (post-race): hot-off-the-grill cheeseburger that was just dripping fat (in the best possible way); one half of a secondhand burger from my daughter that was starting to congeal (in a way that had its charms, actually); a hunk of tri-tip (if you’re not from California and haven’t heard of tri-tip, just think of it as steak that is better that what you’re getting); a hot dog that was weirdly salty, even by my standards, but good

Dinner (post-race): Asian-ish noodles with tofu; sautéed bok choy; a bunch of chips and salsa because I’m getting back in touch with my inner fat bastard after dropping some weight for this race; one Lagunitas Maximus IPA featured in this official post-race Beck’st:

I couldn’t get my head right for this race, for the longest time. I finally located my mojo during the last five minutes of my warm-up. I suffered pretty seriously, though not as much as last year because it was a demonstrably easier course (less climbing, shorter overall). I just missed the podium (i.e., came in sixth place), which was a bit of a letdown until I remembered that nobody cares anyway and I shouldn’t either.

Long version

The suffering started about three weeks before the race, because a) I stopped drinking beer, figuring it’d be a lot easier to lose weight than to build strength, and b) I fretted unduly about racing poorly. It’s an old story: I was pleased with my race last year and feared I wouldn’t live up to the new standard I’d set for myself.

On top of that, my derailleur hanger broke during practice the week before the race, throwing my preparation into a tailspin. You’d think it’d be easy to scrounge up a new derailleur hanger but it turns out they’re almost as unique, one to the next, as snowflakes. Everyone recommended a different source for a replacement: Wheels Manufacturing, North Shore Billet, Amazon, some place in Italy, some place in France … by the time someone said, “Have you tried derailleurhanger.com?”  I thought he was joking—but he wasn’t. Thinking I wouldn’t get to (i.e., have to) race came as a relief, so then of course I fell into a deep pit of self-loathing over being relieved. Then the race got canceled (due to down trees on the course), so we postponed until the following week for the next race in the series, by which time the replacement derailleur hanger had arrived and I got to (i.e., had to) race after all.

There was a mix-up at the motel, the Howard Johnson. I had reserved two queen beds but was given a single king. They kept saying they couldn’t upgrade me without charging more money, and I kept showing them my confirmation (on my phone) with the original price, for two beds. They kept saying that couldn’t be my confirmation because it purported to be directly from their website, whereas, they insisted, I’d booked through booking.com—which I hadn’t. I say “they” because a supervisor got involved. He was on the phone with the home office for a good while before figuring out the problem: they were simply looking at the wrong reservation. Seems a guy with a slightly similar name, Dennis Abraham or some such, had checked in earlier and they gave him my room, and then gave me his. They actually misread his name as mine, and vice-versa: the same category of error, twice in one day. “This explains why Dennis came down earlier to complain about not getting a king-size bed!” the guy said triumphantly, as though spending 20 minutes ironing out such a stupid mistake should be some kind of bonding experience for us both. 

I woke in the morning to this weather:

Fortunately, the rain subsided, though the race course was mighty wet. The whole morning my head was just filled with all this negative BS about my lack of fitness and the unsuitability of the course to my strengths (due to less climbing than last year). Yes, of course you’re correct: if I’m not fit, the lack of climbing is actually a boon. (The wimp who takes over my brain is also an idiot.) Fortunately my warm-up on the stationary trainer finally turned things around. Once I started to suffer, the sheer familiarity of the pain and high heart rate set things right. I became more robotic, which is a big step up from actually thinking. Plus I had the right music—my workout megamix—and in particular the Lil Wayne song “Mr. Carter” which is one of my favorites. I’ve never been able to figure out what, if anything, the song is about. It’s just a lot of blather, but really good blather.

I got a really cool race number this year: 151. Why is that cool? Well, I told the kids I like it because it’s palindromic. That was my official story. The real reason I liked it is because this number shows up in some really cool music lyrics as a reference to a (now discontinued) brand of overproof Bacardi rum. In the song “One Mic,” Nas describes how his rap is “Pure, like a cup of virgin blood, mixed with/ 151, one sip’ll make a [fella] flip.” (Yeah, 151 is strong—it’s 75.5% alcohol.) Bob Schneider sings about a guy who is “Hard as boardwalk bubblegum/ And smooth as 151.” So, to live up to this number plate, my job was to be strong and smooth.

Was I strong? Well, it wasn’t too bad. I did find that on the climbs I could put the hurt on people. I’d heard these climbs described as “really long” but they seemed really short. I think that’s the beauty of eating like a pig all the time and drinking beer but still riding bikes: you have to haul that around all that extra weight during training, and then when you start living sensibly three weeks before a race, and the pounds melt off, you still have some strength left over. (Not to overstate anything, of course, since I didn’t even make the podium.)

Was I smooth? Well, I picked the right lines and never came to a stop or had to dab my foot, which is saying something because the course was pretty muddy and had some pretty sketchy uphill sections. Wow, I just realized how boring this is. Sorry.

Eating was a bit of a problem, so when I found a fairly smooth stretch I ate most of an entire sleeve of Clif shot blox at once. This basically cemented my mouth shut for awhile, and left this thick film of blox goo (bloxfilm?) on my teeth, which improved my performance due to its sweetness. (Click here for details.)

I had great support in the feed zone. It was a cool day and the laps were short, but I still went through 3½ bottles in four laps.

There was this lone course marshal in the far-flung regions of the course, and I’d pass him twice per lap. He had this cow-bell he would ring like crazy, which was inordinately uplifting.

There were several very deep puddles on the course that we’d bomb through, sending water gushing up everywhere like one of those amusement park water rides. Oddly, only my trailing foot would get splashed. By the end of the race I had a drenched left foot and a bone-dry right foot.

The skies looked ominous the whole day, and we got sprinkled on by just a bit of rain, but ultimately the weather held out the whole race.

Other than some crazy fast descents, nothing that exciting happened (other than going almost anaerobic by the top of every climb) until the last lap. My teammate Dean, a fellow coach, had won his Cat 3 race earlier in the day with a well-timed attack on the final climb, and said the climb suited our team perfectly (living, as we do, in a really hilly place such that every single ride prepares us for climbing). On the last lap of my race, I saw this guy I’d remembered from the start line and had been chasing for the whole race (though most of the time he was too far ahead to even see). He raced for the Woodside Beasts, a rival high school team, meaning he’s a coach too. I started to close in on him on the final climb, right toward the end of the race. It looked like I wasn’t gaining fast enough and that he’d hold me off, except that I could tell he was just dying.

I dug deep, deeper, and deepest, and literally 50 feet from the end of the climb I finally passed him. Damn, what a sucker-punch! I’ll bet he’s still pissed off about it! Now was the tricky part—holding him off on the fast, technical descent to the finish line. I’m not that great a descender because my wife would kill me if I crashed. I went for broke, and presently on a narrow single-track section came up on a young high school girl who wasn’t going that fast. I knew if I got stuck behind her, the Beast would catch up and surely pass me in the twisty bits near the finish line. On the other hand, there was no place to pass except the thick bramble alongside the trail. Bramble is a notoriously tricky surface to ride on, because the ground can be really bumpy, even rock-infested, beneath the brush, and you won’t know until you’re on it. I took the gamble, and though it was indeed bumpy—my bike heaved like a bucking bronco—I made it past the girl, returned to the single-track, and never saw the Beast again.

I came across the finish line in a world of hurt, lungs burning, chest heaving, and Dean said, “Would you like me to take your bike?” I thought that was a great suggestion but couldn’t figure out how to make it happen. Dean had vanished! Where did he go? Oh, he’s back there! I finally realized that I needed to actually stop my bike. It’s just that I had forgotten how.

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