I'm Adeli Mone, and this is The Slowdown.

You wouldn't know this about me, but there are times that I actually hate talking about poetry.

I mean, even when I was studying at NYU as a young poetry graduate student, even when

I teach, even when I talk casually with friends, there are times when I want, like a

petulant child, to say, you're ruining it, you're ruining it by talking about it too much.

I once sat with a friend in Central Park, and he asked me if I could explain what I did

with my endings, and I felt suddenly betrayed as if we were talking about something so intimate

and dangerous that to respond would be heresy.

He saw me blush and asked why I was suddenly silent.

I said that it felt sometimes like blasphemy to talk about how a poem worked.

And then, of course, there are days when I feel exactly the opposite, and when explicating

a poem, when pulling out the meaning of its punctuation, syntax, line breaks, the meaning

of a certain image, certain sounds, somehow makes the poem blossom into something even

more meaningful than I thought was possible.

When someone points out something in my own poem that I haven't seen, it feels like

discovering some new code for living.

Still, it's not always enough, is it?

The poem itself, the sexy line, the perfect phrase, are all wonderful, but sometimes we

need more from our lives, we need to live off the page.

If you've ever been wooed by a poet, or been the poet or artist doing the wooing, there

comes a moment when the art is not enough.

You need action, more showing, less telling.

...