Didn’t realize as much at the time, but this line is thematically consistent with “El Scorcho,” with the sexes reversed. This bit sounds like “Oh, the redhead said you shred the cello, and I’m jello, baby.” Except me as the redhead and the subject as Rivers Cuomo across the sea (up the street).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okthJIVbi6g

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This expression really became too real to me when I went with a group to a Bed-Stuy charter school on Columbus Day 2006. We were there to get ideas about how to manage a classroom. There was a poster in the main hallway with a bar graph representing the income potential of various professions. The bars were made out of printouts of the US Mint prints. The poem’s subject was there as a teacher, too, I think, though the graph would’ve stuck out either way. I stuck it here because I think of him when anyone says “mad corny” or “mad bank.” This expression is a bit antiquated by now.

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Usually I try to imitate this expression as “for serious,” something I would never say.

Here is what I said about my artistic process for a major poetry fellowship grant (something they would never reward):

My poems are didactics with cheat sheets, plus the guilt. They were written exclusively for the annotation software of Genius.com, a digital humanities website I helped found. These works are hyper-real recreations of moral quandaries experienced by burned-out professionals, told in post-traumatic flashbacks. Most are from professionalism training manual found text or received wisdom. All are annotated with extensive, distracting notes on sources in their ideal presentation. None of these annotations are included in this submission. Of note, I never include the direct inspiration for the poem for privacy reasons and thematic heft—only everything else. The intent behind the good deed recedes from the story, as it did for the provider in real time.
When I write, I report my poems into a GarageBand default podcast setting called “male voice,” though that was not a conscious choice. I am no mimic, but my poems work better read aloud. To simplify sourcing, I read in the first person, and often change personas mid-poem as if shirking responsibility for writing. Whenever I do that, I continue to use some version of my own name. Instead of citing my sources as I would on Genius, I pretend I am their font. In a nod to readers’ complaints that they had no idea what I was talking about in them other than myself, I call them “mo-ems.” Sometimes I change the fonts.
Only a few “mo-ems” are included here. As a collection, I hope they leave the impression of an overwhelming, occasionally incomprehensible aggregate of empty good works: “Big Data.” The poems I have selected for this application represent ones my friend said were good.

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Most of my work draws from the language of corporate social responsibility and non-profit accountability initiatives – the idea of who/what counts, written from the perspective of various people counted out (in)

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One of my favorite poets, Michael Robbins, quoted this song in a poem published around the same time. In the same journal, I think, even. I felt terrible once I realized the coincidence. I’m pretty sure it was a coincidence. I hope it was a coincidence.

This poem is told from the perspective of a Nilsson or Newman aiming for McCartney (meaning the poem’s subject, not this other poet). The conceit here is that Harry Nilsson wrote “One” and never gets the glory.

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This poem was written without regard to process. My “process” usually involves integrating found text into a narrative, whereas this poem is diaristic. And though this one is diaristic, it does not follow my normal pattern of speech. It is written in character in the uptalk of a woman my same age.

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On the front page of the screening book, I wrote this stanza from “To An Athlete Dying Young” :

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears:

It was a reference to Rushmore (“Sic transit gloria: Glory fades. I’m Max Fischer”), for the poem’s line “Smart lad, to slip betimes away/From fields where glory does not stay.” Because the poem subject had literally just cut and released a record. Appropriately, I only had a mechanical pencil on hand. There were a lot of erasures and smudging.

Oklahoma, Arizona, dudn’t matter.

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This poem is much less abstract and loose than it comes off. It is a retelling of the Chuck E Cheese skeeball game story with some of the details left out, which were described in the earlier draft. Originally, there was much more about Steve Brill’s books on data-driven non-profit reform. Brill was my writing mentor in college, and there was a thread in the first draft about the main character as a self-actualized Carole King escaping a Brill building of outer borough men.

So this part of the story is also true, but I don’t know if it ever made it to its intended recipient. Not that it matters: I left it there to leave the feeling behind, not to get it to the person. If not, it was probably because I looked crazy, stashing it on the pedal board, having heard a rumor from a reliable source that there was an afterparty in the Chuck E Cheese later that evening only accessible to music industry people. My hope was they ended up selling my book for tickets.

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The same week I played the late-night skeeball game, I was responsible for a public hospital patient whose mother worked the night shift at Barclays Center. I guess it might as well be a “clean up the mess they made” Gatsby callback, but it’s not.

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