Poem of the Week | June 09, 2025

“YOUR POEMS SUCK THEY SUCK THEY KEEP ON SUCKING” by Matthew Lippman is our Poem of the Week.

Lippman is the author of six poetry collections. His latest collection, We Are All Sleeping With Our Sneakers On (2024), is published by Four Way Books. His previous collection, Mesmerizingly Sadly Beautiful (2020), is published by Four Way Books. It was the recipient of the 2018 Levis Prize. In 2027 his next collection, Cry Baby Cry, will be published by Four Way Books.

YOUR POEMS SUCK THEY SUCK THEY KEEP ON SUCKING

Let me tell you a story about Chagall.
It’s not really about Chagall.
It’s about the Jewish Ghetto in Venice.
It’s not really about the Jewish Ghetto in Venice.
It’s about David W.
David W. is a poet.
He was my poetry professor at Hobart College.
I worked with him for years.
He always said, Your poems suck they suck they keep on sucking.
He was beautiful;
he was the lilac bush in Geneva in mid-May near Coxe Hall
that Chagall might have flown over in his paintings.
I have always believed that the women in his paintings
flying or floating or hovering
have always been Marc himself.
David, himself, and I, myself,
would sit in his little office with the 6 million books
while he tried to teach me something about craft
but my heart always got in the way.
That is what he told me, Your heart always gets in the way.
I didn’t care.
What else did I have?
Certainly not my mind. I had no smarts.
My smarts were in my heart and here’s the story:
When I went to the Jewish Ghetto in Venice in the fall of 1986
I saw the kids,
the little Italian bambinas and bambinos,
kicking around a soccer ball off the stucco walls and when I looked up
I noticed that the windows were so close to one another that I thought,
My God, they really crammed them in here tight now, didn’t they, those Nazi
     fuckers?
What could I do?
What was there to say?
So, I did what I always do.
I played soccer with the Italian kids and believed I was a Venetian
and then I went back to my pensione and wrote a poem about
Marc Chagall and the Jewish Ghetto in Venice and my Italian brothers and sisters
playing soccer
and 2 months later showed it to David, who,
after reading it with biscotti crumbles crumbling around in his lap, said,
Okay, boychik,
let’s go smash our faces into the lilac bush
and go get us some Cokes with lunch.

Author’s Note

I suppose this poem, “Your Poems Suck They Suck They Keep On Sucking” started out as a celebration. A love poem. Poems often begin from some emotive freight train. I was thinking about my old poetry professor, David W. He was instrumental in my growth as a poet. The poem is pretty straightforward in that regard. Later on in life we have become friends, which blows my mind, because for so long, at least in my mind, he was, first and foremost, my teacher. Now, we are friends, deep friends, a deep friendship that trickles into things like marriage and grandkids and recipes and music. We have a correspondence, now, a poetry correspondence, which is born out of a love of poetry. We send each other poems. I couldn’t imagine when I was twenty, in college, that we would be here now, in this landscape. He straightened me out back then. No, he told me the truth about my work. That my poems sucked. Something happened, though, to me, on a semester abroad in Italy. I had that experience in the Venice Ghetto, had been looking at some Chagall paintings, wrote a poem, came back to America, to Geneva, NY, showed it to him and he told me the truth again. That, finally, I had written something that resonated. I just wanted to capture that in the poem. To tell him in a poem that I love him. To say, too, that it takes a long time, as a poet, to find your voice. A really long time, and so you have to practice and always be experimenting with your practice, so you can, at the end of the morning, go and eat lunch with your friend, with your face in the flowers and your hand on a sandwich.