You remember Quickmuse, right? That”s the cool website where two well-known poets are handed a passage of literature and get a set amount of time to come up with a poem based on it. The coolest part of Quickmuse – according to some – is that you get to watch the poets in the process of composing their thoughts, and then their poems. And the program that Quickmuse uses (Poematic, with appropriate kudos to Fletcher (Fletch) Moore, who wrote the thing) records the keystrokes and plays them back on demand, so if you can”t be online to watch the agon while it”s happening, you can watch it in exact replay later on the site. The latest update on Quickmuse landed in my mailbox this morning, to wit:

This week, from the frigid and barren wastes of New England, we bring you two fine poets…

David Rivard: What can we say about David Rivard? He won the 1996 James Laughlin award for Wise Poison, as well as two Pushcart Prizes, a couple National Endowment for the Arts grants, and the Celia B. Wagner Award from the Poetry Society of America. A lecturer at Tufts and the poetry editor of the Harvard Review, Rivard is also the first person to use the word “noctilucent” on QuickMuse. Read David”s poem here.

Adrian Blevins: Then there”s Adiran Blevins. Her book, The Brass Girl Brouhaha, made Tony Hoagland yelp, “Poetry lovers, this is the dirty, trash-talking, highly edified real thang. When you open this book, you should hear the ballistic explosion of a cork jumping out of a bottle, or the starter”s gun, which signals that the wild race has begun.” She”s a proud owner of a Rona Jaffe Writers” Foundation Award and an assistant professor at Colby College. Read her poem here.

Being the sort of good girl who follows instructions, I did as instructed and clicked the links to read the poems inspired by this bit of writing:

Advice from the Experts

By Bill Knott

I lay down in the empty street and parked
My feet against the gutter”s curb while from
The building above a bunch of gawkers perched
Along its ledges urged me don”t, don”t jump.

I liked both poems – to an extent. I liked the Blevins poem a little more in some ways – it”s more immediate, more in the moment. She talks about jumping ”

like a
girl in a field, flat out,
unencumbered as rice”

about leaping in feet first without taking the time to look at what others would tell you and advise you. The poem may have a few rough edges, but it shows her professional polish – a pleasure to read.

Rivard”s poem takes just the opposite tack – he talks about the way that society advises us to take the bull by the horns and make that leap of faith, grab for the gusto and flow with the moment – and how much he doesn”t like it. His language is both more formal and less structured than Blevins:

I don”t know about you

but the chance to leap has never interested me

actually

he says, and then goes on to list a dizzying series of images and ends with… well, let”s just say, I give the poet points for managing to use two $10 words in one sentence – noctilucent and ranunculus. Don”t get me wrong – I love words, from the humblest of penny words to the most grandiose terms that ever graced the pages of a dictionary. I have, at times, been tempted to compose a poem with no meaning – just the sounds of those delicious, roll-off-your-tongue-and-melt-in-your-mouth words. But I like the poems I read to be “accessible” on a basic level. I want words that don”t send readers scrambling for the dictionary so they can understand the poem. I”d far rather have my readers picking through threads of images to relate them to each other than stubbing their toes against words that stop the images dead while you figure out the definition.

Perhaps it”s unfair to judge a poet harshly for a poem written under the constraints imposed by Quickmuse – but there it is. Part of me, reading Rivard”s poem, is sitting there wondering just how the thought process went when he decided to write “noctilucent” instead of “night-lit”. But those are the choices that make us poets, no?