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Fairleigh Dickinson University

Poetry

This Is Not a Personal Poem

April 4, 2014

Alex Dimitrov

This is not a personal poem.

I don’t write about my life.

I don’t have a life.

I don’t have sex.

I have not experienced death.

Don’t take this personally but

I don’t have any feelings either.

The feelings I don’t have don’t run my life.

I have an imagination. I’m imagining it now.

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level.

This poem stole that line from John Ashbery.

This poem wants you to like it,

please click “like.”

This poem was written during a recession.

I’m so politically conscious

the word “politics” is in my poem.

This is not a New York poem.

There’s not enough room for all the wars in this poem.

Gay marriage is now in this poem.

Have you liked this poem yet?

It was written in 2011 in New York and posted 11 minutes ago.

Would you sleep with the poet who wrote this poem?

Would you buy his book? Click here.

This poem loves language.

This poem has slept with other poems

written by poets who love language.

All poets love language.

Let’s talk about language while people die.

This poem cares a lot but wants you

to think that it doesn’t really care.

The speaker of this poem may have been

born in a former Communist country.

It may or may not matter.

I had an orgasm before writing this poem.

I have my sunglasses on while reading this poem.

Everyone is going to die

please don’t take it personally.

The world. The world.

The world is blood-hot and personal.

I stole that line from Sylvia Plath.

Put your money on this poem.

I love the money shot.

This is not a personal poem.

This poem is only about Alex Dimitrov.

 

 

###

 

Alex Dimitrov is the author of American Boys (2012) and Begging for It (2013). His poems have been published in Poetry, The Yale Review, Kenyon Review, Slate, Tin House, and the American Poetry Review, which awarded him the Stanley Kunitz Prize in 2011. He is the Content Editor at the Academy of American Poets and teaches creative writing at Rutgers University.

 

“This Is Not a Personal Poem” appeared in our Late Fall 2012 issue, Loss Control.

 

 

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