The Murphys Laws of Poetry

Poetic Murphy’s law: When someone thinks he can write a poem, he always does.

Murphy’s Law of Duality: When someone thinks he can write two poems, he’ll end up with a triptych.

Corollary of Archimedes: A poem expands to fill the entire volume.

Exception to the Murphy’s law: Any fool can write free verse.

First corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed.

Amendment to the First Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Any poem can be printed, even unprintable.

Second Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: All poems, however unprintable, will end up on the web.

Sequelae to the Corollary of Guttenberg-Fitzpatrick: Not a single poem will be read.

Murphy’s Law of Thermodynamics: Editing makes everything worse.

First Principle of Poetic Evolution: “...so peerless amid all the Amazons. com...”

Conclusions of the Emergency Orthodontist: Rhymes, teeth, and barstools fly Saturday nights.

First Axiom: Any poem can be set to music.

Corollary (the all-thumbs rule): Of the myriad tunes, they will invariably choose the one guaranteed to do the greatest damage.

Second Axiom: There’s a doggerel for every tune.

The Law of Poetic Frequencies: Anthologies automatically open on the page with the host’s poems.

The Cardinal Rule of Poetic Merit: Real poetry is what I and my friends write.

First Rule of Literary Criticism:: Shakespeare is dead.

First corollary to the First Rule of Literary Criticism: Hecht is also dead.

First Law of Publishing: The shelf life of a book is inversely related to the poet’s expiration date.

Second Law of Publishing: Publishing in the vanity press is better than vain attempts at finding a publisher.

The Main Rule of Literary Criticism: I don’t like your yellow blouse.

The Law of Humpty-Dumpty who sat on Wall Street (next stop Bowery): One writes for children the same way one writes for adults, only worse.

The Law of Poetic Linearity: The author’s enthusiasm is directly proportional to the reader’s dismay.

Poetic Relativity (e=mc2): Poems travel with the speed of blight.

Third Law of Publishing: Poetic license comes with a flea and tick collar.

Mikhail Rabinovich translated by Anna Rozenshtein

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Mikhail Rabinovich was born in 1959, in Leningrad, where he worked as an engineer. He came to New York in 1991. Here he works, of course, as a computer programmer. Rabinovich is his pen-name, though his real name is also Rabinovich. His works came out in print in four countries, ranging from "The New Russian Word" to Odessa's "Fountain" and from the "Slovo/Word" journal to "The Independent Newspaper". Mikhail was a collaborator in ten prose and poetry almanacs, published on both sides of the Atlantic ocean. He is a winner of the Internet competition "Russian America" (as part of "Tenet-2002" project). He authored two books: Far Away from Me, a book of short stories, as well as In the Light of Unclear Events, a collection of poems.

More from Mikhail Izrailevich Rabinovich in translation.