This poem is styled after an exercise I did around 5th grade called an “And then” poem (in which you mimic the style of a model poem that details some rising action with “And then… And then… And then!”) It’s also taking on a high school personal essay exercise called “crystal moment,” like preparing personal statements.

The break into “we” jars and is supposed to show how the narrator rejoins the real world through food. The “adult voice” breaks in here with the “we should be doing more to help.” Historically, my assigned chore was clearing the dinner table because I was usually too caught up in a book or TV show to set it. You could get a little broader here about help as, like, helping the earth by freeing oneself of franchises, or stopping complaining about them.

The word and sound repetition is not to emphasize ritual, but to emphasize the kid being annoying. I write and talk in run-on sentences that I am told can be very difficult to follow at times. The effect was more exaggerated when I was a child, because I was an enthusiastic child.

So perfect that you can’t get a decent Google image of the Baskin Robbins cake to which I’m referring. It’s also used here because the local Baskin-Robbins was across the street from the public library, and I associate birthday (wisdom/knowledge acquisition) and academic incentives (Pizza Hut) with ice cream. I ate very few sweets as a kid, as outlined in the poem, and that was by choice. And the cake is treated as special, not being special at all, as a standing order cake.

The idea here is that the kid cannot be replicated by other franchises and is fine as she is. The cooking imagery and hard sounds are meant to represent people telling me as a kid that my earnestness should be reined in for my own good. So the narrator is getting wounded by growing older and inadvertently sounding judgmental to other people.

Also an attack on nature poetry, because I can’t write it and wanted to point out that I experience sense memory as an ad or an prefabricated workshop assignment to elementary school teachers

There is no sexual innuendo here. The kid is very literal and exposed to a lot of crudity, but more interested in sticking with healthy crudites.

I was not a weird kid, just a sensitive one. And I had many unusual interests (history of campaign strategy in remote presidential elections, natal charts and palmistry, professional rivalries among late 19th/early 20th century mathematicians and physicists, child development theory, early history of the AIDS epidemic, medieval saints and martyrs). Most of the time I was happy to sit for hours at a time reading or going to museums, and everyone was fine with it, which didn’t prevent me from feeling weird. I was too intensely into the interests I shared with other kids my age, like the Olympics and music and OJ, so we never vibed to the same degree. We could play sports together and talk in school, but I only felt on the same playing field when I was at the kitchen table with the newspaper. So I am the only normal at the table, at which the news feeds me like food. And I did used to say things like “normal stuff” to describe anything that I did that wasn’t hyperspecific. The change in diction and register here was very intentional, whereas the line breaks were not, because it began as prose.

Readers say my poetry is aggressively difficult and dashed off, maybe as a defense mechanism. So I wrote these two here (“Building Insight” and “Passion Project”) to prove I could write simply. I sent several other whacked out poems in this submission packet, including a really willfully obnoxious one making fun of MFA poetry called “The Tibetan Book of the MoMilli.” Now I only like it for the terrible title.

“Building Insight” was constructed from unused drafts of a prose piece, “Contract with America All-American Girl of 1994: Changes for Reen-Bean.” Before American Girl doll nostalgia became popular, I wanted to make fun of American Girl nostalgia and wrote an outline for a six-book series based on me (“a spirited suburban Washington spark-plug living history of the first Clinton administration in the years 1994-1996”). I read historical fiction books and political non-fiction almost exclusively when I was ten, and the American girl characters are all born on the 4 of the decade. I was on the 3.

The “building insight” title comes from American Girl as well. Years ago, I invited a TV writer on a first date to American Girl Place. I thought he would have funny things to say about anachronisms and racial politics in the doll displays. He then replied thanks but no thanks, that he had a girlfriend, but was kind and polite about it. And I appreciated that. So this piece is about how girlish dreams can lead one to miss the forest for the Kirsten St. Lucia Day wreath and hot cross buns.

It was unfortunate that I was typecast as a Felicity for so many years for my freckles and interest in Colonial Williamsburg. Not that I was into horses or Tories. I was that kid complaining to my parents about historical inaccuracies in CW installations and the transparent motives of the Rockefeller Foundation and the sanctimony of people who insisted on total proof of concept! Adults liked that I still had kid qualities like liking the local sandwich place and Busch Gardens (they’d then laugh when I would go into some earnest comment about how I wished there weren’t gentrification of the area surrounding Colonial Williamsburg). So this poem was an attempt to mimic what I sounded like at age ten.

I was once told that Maboo referred to his departure from Genius as the Summer of George, but that’s apocryphal.

Probably in my top 5 if not number 1.

Feel like the entirety of Veep is trying to recapture the magic of this sequence. Despite its tremendous cast, it never quite gets there.