I had a hideous experience this weekend. An editor acquaintance called and asked me to join his "poetry slam" team for a competition in an Irish tavern.

Now, I've been writing poems for many years. In the 1970s, I was an up and coming young poet, appearing in magazines, anthologies, and chapbooks. And I was a good reader in-person, using humor and natural charm to put a poem across.

By the 1980s, however, I found myself moving away from it. A poet is kind of like a god, and it is hard to be a god into your thirties. And as paper and postage costs rose, it got harder to get published. When the ratio of rejections to acceptances grew, I sent my poems around less. And good old ordinary prose was so friendly, so natural.

I still wrote poems. I adored the rumble of the old masters, and I enjoyed the mischief of the new. So I accepted the invitation. Humor, charm -- I retained 'em in spades. Plus I was older and wiser -- good attributes for a poet, right? I was confident I'd do well.

But I was awful.

First of all, a poetry slam is a competition. Poets form teams, then try to outdo one another on stage. Judges award points to poets based on performance. The ultimate value of a poem is expressed in the number given it by judges.

I found this very strange. There was nothing "team-like" about my team; we were four people unfamiliar with one another's work, randomly assembled for the sake of competing.

I asked my acquaintance why we were doing it. He said, "I want to win!"

I asked him, "Why?"

I couldn't understand how our high score -- a subjective number, which no team member could take much credit for -- could satisfy, and what that had to do with why people put their thoughts down on paper in the first place.

When the slam began, I understood more. At 48, I was by far the oldest person reading, except for a graybeard Irishmen with a page of dirty limericks. Everyone else was between 18 and 28, and their poems were very public in scope -- satires of the workplace, denunciations of the establishment, invocations to enlightenment, and stinging litanies of the F word.

It was basic beatnik stuff. Impassioned but impersonal, whiny yet ingenuous. Occasionally interesting, never intimate.

Then it was my turn. My poem, "Remainders," was a 70-line poem about my long struggle to find an audience. Written in 1986, it commemorated the remaindering of an early book of poems, and segued into a description of my deepest longings as a writer -- to light people up with words. It has a flashy exterior, but it is all soft and gooey inside.

I knew in an instant in the spotlight what the problem was. It was the problem the poem was about -- that there is no natural audience for a poem today. Instead of receptive listeners, I was trying to touch the hearts of fellow gladiators. There was no there there.

Compared to what other people had read, I must have seemed very owlish, bifocaled and feckless. No, not feckless -- less that other F-word.

(And they are right. I've written and published five million words, and I have yet to use that word in print. To me, it's waving a white flag to use that language, a concession that fresh words can't communicate, so you fall back on stale code. I might use it in dialogue, because people talk like that. But it isn't my voice.)

People didn't hoot at me or ignore me or cut me to ribbons. They just politely ignored me, and the judges rated my poem, a poem I identify heart and soul with, that to me communicates the gnawing frustration of writing poetry, its sacred inner character along with its low status among sensible people, the lowest rating of any poem in the slam.

No getting around it -- I was devastated. Humiliated, patronized, cast aside!

I sat stunned through the next couple of performances, then Rachel signaled to me that perhaps we should leave -- that all the fellatio and mother fornication might be a bit much for 11-year-old Jonathan to hear. Using Jon's tender sensibilities as a human shield for my own, we slunk out of the tavern and drove home, where I sat and brooded on my advanced years and decreased relevancy for the rest of the day.

The last lines of my poem sum up my feelings:

Read Mike's revenge poem: The Lord God Has Words with the Choir!"

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