The city officials were the ones to ask.
Organizing the event was an enormous task.
She had a personality which could tame
Any recalcitrance with the dropping of a name.
The poetry officials met with the city officials.
It would get done
Just as small trees with crooked branches grow under the sun.
Youth had no time for a PhD
But still they needed to stamp the poetry.
The right people wrote from LA
To recommend the low residency MFA
Earned in Brooklyn with her neurosis
Thanks to Rimbaud, the New Yorker,
A divorce, and two overdoses.
It was complicated to be
Keen to the right kind of poetry.
But the publisher said he would handle it.
Good had nothing to do with being a poet;
It was the news stories they mined,
Or the perception they were troubled, but kind.
And if you were to publish them,
They would be happy to publish you again.
But during these calculations there was also so much to do.
Me? I did nothing. I was the poet laureate of you.