Ninja favourite Dan Nester, author of How to Be Inappropriate, writes on his experience of the NYC poetry scene, and how he got the hell out.

There is a school of thought that holds that the poet’s job is to straddle the sacred and profane, to say and do the perfectly wrong thing at the perfectly right time. To do so, writing teachers and writing books tell us, is to act as a prophet, a truth-teller. This translates into some remarkable misbehavior on the part of poets. I, too, engaged in this poet misbehavior. Stealing centerpieces at restaurants. Heckling pool players in George Plimpton’s basement. Making a point of mentioning to a Student Upset That the Thesis Film in Which She Appears Naked Throughout Is Now Playing at the Film Forum, that I had just seen her naked onscreen at the Film Forum. Instigating a bar fight at the book party of a Successful Fiction Writer, in which I punch out the second-string bouncer and am taken away in a police van. To complain or protest as I did all this would itself be regarded as inappropriate, somehow un-poet-like.

Poets behave badly, a Famous Poet once wrote to me after I complained about how another poet sent me a flurry of angry emails for rejecting his sestina. Their feelings of entitlement are misplaced. As long as one keeps busy with other poets in New York, none of this bad behavior matters. I introduced poets to each other, ran reading series to meet other poets, edited journals and solicited poets’ work, talked to journal editors about poets and poets about journals, introduced poets to publishers, drove poets on tour, put poets up in my mother’s home. After 10 years, my address book filled with poet-names of all stripes: narrative, language, experimental, lyric, avant garde, conceptual, formalist, slam, feminist, political (always far left), personal-confessional. Those who attended the readings I went to were, by and large, other aspiring poets.