journal features

you won't like it

the journal of Michael Werneburg

twenty-seven years and one million words

Toronto, 2011.09.27

The boy's cottoned to my feeble reverse-psychology ploy. To get him interested in some food on the table, I tell him to go play. When he's refusing to try something new, I steal bits of it and tell him to stick with what he knows because he won't like the new stuff.

Today at dinner he told me, "no, daddy, don't eat it!" Corralling his plate and bowl, he said, "you wouldn't like it."

rand()m quote

Immature poets imitate mature poets steal bad poets deface what they take and good poets make it into something better or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique utterly different than that from which it is torn the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time or alien in language or diverse in interest.

—T.S. Eliot