John Poch teaches at Texas Tech University and is the editor of 32 Poems magazine. His first book, Poems, was published by Orchises Press in 2004. His second collection, Two Men Fighting with a Knife (Story Line Press, 2008), won the 2008 Donald Justice Prize. His third collection, Dolls, was just released by Orchises Press. He is also the editor, with Chad Davidson, of Hockey Haiku: The Essential Collection (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2006). He has recent work in The Iowa Review, Unpleasant Event Schedule, Paris Review, and other journals.

{ to the poetry archives }

Randall Mann is the author of two collections of poetry, Breakfast with Thom Gunn (University of Chicago Press 2009) and Complaint in the Garden (Zoo/Orchises 2004), winner of the 2003 Kenyon Review Prize; and the co-author of the textbook Writing Poems, Seventh Edition (Pearson Longman 2007). He is a 2010 Library Laureate of San Francisco.

{ to the poetry archives }

Stephen Priest lives in northern Brooklyn and works in advertising.

{ to the poetry archives }

Sam Cheuk holds an MFA in creative writing from NYU. His first collection, Love Figures, will be published by Insomniac Press in 2011.

{ to the poetry archives }

Adam Vines is an assistant professor of English at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, where he co-edits Birmingham Poetry Review. He has published recently or has work forthcoming in Tampa Review, Poet Lore, Hunger Mountain, Chariton Review, New Orleans Review, among others.

{ to the poetry archives }

Brooklyn Copeland was born in Indianapolis in 1984. She lives just north of there, where she works as a yoga instructor and in a winery.

Last fall, Blue Hour Press released Ms. Copeland’s Reunions, available here.

{ to the poetry archives }

Auto-generated text as life coach, fortune teller, and poetry tool.

By Saara Raappana, Cellpoems Co-Editor

I didn’t realize what happened until it was too late—I’d already hit send. My text message was zooming down an invisible track across town to my roommate’s phone. I’d meant to tell him that I’d gotten caught in an early afternoon thunderstorm, that I wouldn’t be home for another 20 minutes. Instead, texting blind as I tried to open my umbrella while squeezing myself under the heftiest limb of a spindly tree, I hadn’t paid attention to which words the predictive text was inserting under my frantic thumb strokes. I’d sent this:

Stuck in the pain. Good soon, though.

This was a few years ago—I was tunnel-visioning through my second semester of grad school: I’d gone overly pale and skinny from staying up all night rejecting half-finished paper ideas and obsessing over my non-existent thesis while living on coffee, cigarettes, and bags of mini chocolate bars. I’d forgotten all about full nights of sleep or buying—much less eating—vegetables, and I was too entrenched to notice. I’d let myself get so out of control that my T9 was staging an intervention. Holding my half-open umbrella as the rain filtered through the tree and trickled through my hair, I was struck by both the bathetic truth of the text and by the temporality it expressed: Good soon. I didn’t bother correcting it. Tellingly, my roommate didn’t notice the text was a mix-up.

I loved the M.A.S.H. game when I was a kid, the one where you chose five possibilities in several categories to predict your future: spouse, job, car, car color, number of kids, and the color of the Mansion, Apartment, Shack, or House where your future would unfold. After generating a random number, the fortune teller counted through, scratching out option after option until you were down to one prediction in each category. I loved choosing the names and colors that would make two narrow rows of potential futures snake up and down the notepaper, loved the ritualized secrecy of the practitioner hiding her pencil to draw concentric circles until the I called “stop,” hoping to catch the perfect moment that would count right up to marriage to Johnny Depp, a reasonable number of kids, a Ferrari and a purple mansion—all that, plus a glamorous career as a celebrity veterinarian or a foreign correspondent.

But where’s the fun in perfect futures? Per the rules, you had to add some hateful possibilities to the mix. The most giggle-worthy prognostications came from the most wildly inconvenient or incongruous possibilities, when the numbers declared you’d be ball-and-chaining it with Rodney Dangerfield and 268 screaming children crammed into a puce shack while you drove your dump truck to a day job at the Pick-n-Roll. From that limited set of variables you could end up with an infinitely shiftable spread of futures.

The ultimate pleasure of the M.A.S.H. game wasn’t those lists of blurted possibilities or the random number generated by the concentric circle—those were great, as was the suspense that built as each line was deleted. But the ultimate goal came after the final variables were chosen—the technicolor strip that flickered before my eyes where a grown-up version of me tied my apron and got into the passenger seat of a plaid dump truck. Johnny Depp, in the driver seat, lit his cigarillo before driving me to my shift at the Pick-N-Roll. Two-hundred sixty-six of my 268 children dangled out of the mansion windows or held matches against the dry hedges,  screaming goodbye. The delight was in the surprise of the final product, nothing like I’d originally pictured it.

All these years later, I get the limited-but-infinite possibilities of predictive text. I’m fast on my thumbs, but with three-to-four possible letters per key, my text messages still occasionally surprise me. I try to say I’ll be there later but end up demanding to be lauded. I think I’m describing my new lipstick but end up with the clearly aloe-fortified kissstick. Money shifts to moody (predictive text can be both topical and maudlin) and a late-night weekend text about “the condition of the roads” turns to “the condition of the sober” (Public service message: Don’t text while on the sober no matter how roads you are.). I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about the ramifications of shit turning into shiv or “zombie attack” going into the cellular ether as “womb attack.”

M.A.S.H., predictive text, and the discipline of reading and writing poetry have conspired together to teach me that it’s my job to turn accidents and inconveniences into tiny blasts of generativity. Mind you, botched texts are not, themselves, poetry. I’m so far unaware of a single poem that’s even been inspired by a T9 glitch (though I may have written something close to “caught in the pain” during my 14 year-old, black-nail-polish phase). But humor me: picture Frost thumbing out the first incarnation of “no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader” as an explanation for a flubbed text.

Aside from flexing one’s metrical chops, the restrictions poets place on ourselves serve to distract the conscious, calculating—often disappointingly predictable—mind, using inconvenience and accident to push the writer toward those head-popping surprises that will bump a well-wrought poem over the edge to greatness. They take the idea or plan of the poem and shake it up, and we keep coming up with new techniques to achieve this: Everything from the surrealists’ automatic writing trances to the Beats’ “first thought, best thought” (even if it was performative), to the intricate lattices that we have to climb to achieve the rigid requirements of a sestina or a villanelle all serve to distract us into forgetting to drive the poem in its original direction; and the delight is in the surprise of the final product, nothing like we’d pictured it. Under the best circumstances, when I think I’m letting someone know a storm will make me late, what I get instead is a description of my secret self, so shockingly accurate that I just stand there and let the rain wash over me.

The Texas Institute of Letters awarded Christopher Bakken’s second book, Goat Funeral, its prize for the best book of poetry published in 2006. He is also the author of After Greece (2001) and co-translator of The Lions’ Gate: Selected Poems of Titos Patrikios (2006). His work has appeared recently or is forthcoming in Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Subtropics, and Literary Imagination.

{ to the poetry archives }

Kate Angus’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in Barrow Street, Subtropics, Gulf Coast, Mid-American Review, Verse Daily, Barrelhouse, North American Review, and Third Coast, among other journals. She lives in New York and is one of the founding editors of ex machina.

{ to the poetry archives }

In the fall, Cellpoems featured another poem from Mr. Zawacki’s videotape series.

Read it here: Videotape 62

Andrew Zawacki is a poet, critic, editor, and translator. His first book, By Reason of Breakings won the 2001 University of Georgia Contemporary Poetry Series, chosen by Forrest Gander. Work from his second book, Anabranch, was awarded the 2002 Cecil Hemley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America. The volume also includes his 2001 chapbook Masquerade, selected by C.D. Wright to receive the 2002 Alice Fay Di Castagnola Award. He has coedited the international literary magazine Verse with Brian Henry since 1995 and has taught at the University of Georgia since 2005. His most recent book, Petals of Zero Petals of One, was published this year by Talisman House.

{ to the poetry archives }