Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    From $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Bad Ideas
    Bad Ideas
    Bad Ideas
    Ebook84 pages25 minutes

    Bad Ideas

    By Michael V. Smith

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Nobody knows bad ideas quite like Michael V. Smith. In his new collection of poetry, he speaks to an intangibility of sense, or a sense beyond the rational. Bad Ideas explores the inevitability of loss and triumph with characteristic irony and tenderness. Through this dazzling collection of a remembered life, hung out to ogle like laundry on the line, Smith recalls a mother who discovers a sex tape, a man who dreams of birthing his own son and a woman who blends her baby girls into milkshakes.

    Bad Ideas is a testament to how an altered perspective effects change, how stories can be recast. The collection forms itself into an exercise in which optimism is a practiced art recaptured in dreams and prayers and combined to acknowledge the unknowable, the contradictory, the ungraspable: "An evening is composed / in a hundred unchoreographed / dramas”; "I pull a Clark Kent / transform, dressed as a monk / in burgundy and gold robes. I think / this will protect me, but it doesn't”; "Dear Hatred, sweet / Hatred, do you not move our enemies / to know us better?” Hyperbolic and sincere, this collection brawls with the unquantifiable themes of family, loneliness and love.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNightwood Editions
    Release dateMay 8, 2017
    ISBN9780889711211
    Bad Ideas

    Related to Bad Ideas

    Related ebooks

    Poetry For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • UNLIMITED

      Winning Letter

      May 10, 2024

      Recently we visited a place of safety. At security, everyone must sign in. The stone building looks like an ordinary residence with large lawns and a nice playground. A group of laughing children catch my eye. One little one introduces himself. The l

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Mar 1, 2019

      I was like you once, a sealed plastic bag of water filters floating on the sea. I thought my numbers proved my time and space on earth. I thought having children was a way of creating more love. I thought thoughts I was ashamed to speak in case they

      15 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      I The teenaged girl is searching for a placethat goes through, the holeto put the tampon inside. When she finds itshe asks her mother, Is this where the penis would go?Yes, her mother explains.Then I will never have sex. II Sweltering New York City.

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Diary of My Leg Hair

      Dec 8, 2022

      Diary of My Leg Hair
      21 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Dear Frankie

      Aug 1, 2021

      Dear Frankie
      19 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      May 1, 2022

      —after Gerrit van Honthorst’s “Samson and Delilah,” c. 1621 They’ve made a monster of me, marring my namefor eternity. I’m not Delilah,but Laila. I loved him. Each night, in bed, after our bodies became one body, he would succumb to sleep, resting hi

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Final Truth

      Jan 21, 2020

      The Final Truth
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Six Poems

      Feb 28, 2023

      Dear C, At first Virgil’s poem is quite dull; equivocalnames of products at The Container Store: Elfa White Medium Drawer, Mesh NarrowRolling Cart (Medium Solution), Narrow Classic Mesh Box and the number of pirouetting starseach product attained. An

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Cricket League

      May 1, 2024

      Anny Peng, age 9 West Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Once in the forest clearingThere was a little gathering.Firstly, the bears arrived,Already plump and eager for more food.Next there came the hares,Timid, shy, and also sweet!Next was the elk,

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Home

      Feb 25, 2019

      I once lived in a yellow little house. Each morning, birds convened and sang at my bedroom window. The gate was indigo and inside the garden all kinds of flowers rose to kiss the sunny walls. The yellow nest was filled with cherished books, colourful

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Penny From Heaven

      Feb 27, 2020

      Penny From Heaven
      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Little Love

      Apr 5, 2023

      A Little Love
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Poet and The Timber Baron

      Nov 1, 2017

      The Poet and The Timber Baron
      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      The Eternal Adventure

      Jun 29, 2021

      The Eternal Adventure
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      100-WORD-STORY COMPETITION Winners

      Aug 16, 2022

      We’ve been delighted by the huge response to our 100-word-story competition. The entries have flooded in thick and fast during the past few months, but while we’ve enjoyed reading every story, only a few can come out on top! You, our readers, voted t

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Family History in Abstract VIII & Other Poems

      Nov 1, 2024

      from The Philadelphia Inquirer, 14 Jul 1887, p. 4 A Carolina Romance Death of a Man Whose Life Was Blighted by Love A lie bloated in Carolina sun like a plum overripe, still clung but dreaming of release, the embrace of earth, marriage of dirt & seed

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      selections from YOU ARE HERE: POETRY IN THE NATURAL WORLD

      May 1, 2024

      As part of her signature project, You Are Here, U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to observe and reflect on their place in the natural world. The volume was published by Milkweed Editions in April 2024. O

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2022

      followed—in front, as horses—into daisy& silver dancing, knowing the jaw who unkeysin the danced earth to drink me down to haints,& will go again. was willed. distrusted happiness, addicted to it.a god needs of a god. here, i don’t want to reachfor g

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Little House

      Jun 5, 2023

      On Monday nights our mother made popcorn and served it to us in mugs with milk poured over. My younger sister and I carried our mugs into the family room and ate the popcorn with spoons, like cereal. We were five and seven. Until we were allowed to s

      21 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      A Brand-new ending

      Jan 29, 2022

      A Brand-new ending
      7 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Wisdom for The Future

      Dec 20, 2021

      Wisdom for The Future
      10 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Hope Does Push-Ups

      May 19, 2020

      SOME DAYS THERE SEEMS to be little reason for hope, in our families, cities, and world. Well, except for almost everything. The seasons change, a bone mends, Santa Rosa rebuilds after the fire. In the days after a cataclysmic school shooting, thousan

      2 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Two Poems by Phillip B. Williams

      Dec 15, 2017

      The masters are yet dead. Wanting to be human,I tried to rewrite The Waste Land. The canon’s reachcasts ruinous light. The masters’ pens breachthis page where, above, my own hand spectates. Babylonrisen, exorcism in reverse, whose nature upended now?

      6 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Letters

      Feb 7, 2020

      D-DAY for matriculants has come and gone. Nerves evidently started to kick in as some helplines were inundated with calls from distressed learners that same day. After reading about all the trials and the harshness life threw at some, I immediately t

      3 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Three Poems

      Jan 1, 2020

      In class, I stared because of the blood going blue.The chalk that coated our fingerly teeth.The way we lapped each other (on the shorewhere the flowering). I gave away our location. Smacked my lips in the coat closet.Sucked at her teeth. We, on all e

      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2024

      I’ve always been an easy crier (let it come, not ashamed, never held it back in joy or grief, and wherever … subway, teaching, grocery store, (oh the desolate grocery store during the height of Covid) but now, the welling up: that’s daily now. —Lia P

      5 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      Where the HEART IS

      Dec 20, 2022

      Where the HEART IS
      4 min read

    • UNLIMITED

      How the Cicada Screams

      Dec 1, 2020

      How the Cicada Screams
      7 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Bad Ideas

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      Bad Ideas - Michael V. Smith

      Prayers

      Prayer for Irony

      After his wife left him for a juggler

      they met in the supermarket—a tall

      reedy man with fingers too fine

      for his short, plump torso—the artist

      did what he’d always wanted and

      bought a young terrier at the pound.

      He named it Irony, a cleverness

      in the face of grief, because wasn’t it

      he that suggested they invite his future

      cuckold, the juggler, for coffee?

      Around the house the dog pissed

      everywhere paper hadn’t been laid,

      making damp the hall closet, the sofa

      and bed. Irony was a model pup

      when the artist was free and the holiest

      hell at deadlines. If the man had baggies

      the shit was diarrhetic. Each evening

      the artist cried, the puppy padded

      across the room and slept. When, after

      weeks of being single, the artist said yes

      to an invitation to picnic in the park

      with that intern who held the elevator

      on occasion just for him, of course

      he brought Irony who vomited

      grass on the girl’s light blue Mary Janes.

      Finally, the artist thought himself savvy

      to rename the beast Happy. All day

      the terrier bawled for the moon in

      his small, convincing yowl until

      the sun rose on the seventh day

      and the man tried again with Lucky.

      By noon, a transport had flattened fur

      to grille, the nimble way a round dull

      period at the end of a sentence

      can render a trumped-up thought

      finite.

      Prayer for Hatred

      Would evolution have given feathers

      to the reptiles had they loved

      the risks on the ground?

      You resent your limitations, hatred

      being the best of them. A force

      for undoing, unavoidable,

      hatred is your beast rising up

      in the face of that which stands

      between you and fresh water.

      Must we debate if love

      is its bright twin, or if love, siametic,

      could live on its own?

      Has hatred not liberated

      more people than those who have done

      the enslaving?

      Dear hatred, sweet hatred,

      do you not move our enemies

      to know us better?

      Prayer for Envy

      Canvas envies paint.

      The bullhorn envies

      the voice without need

      of a battery.

      The diamond envies

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1