Billy Collins, You Led Me Astray

In truth, I'm no good at mother's golden rule: If you don't have anything good to say, don't say it all. No, no good at all, especially when it involves writers.
In college, it seems that students are still children enough to twist their new-found knowledge into specific, though most likely fluid, opinions which they enjoy bashing into each other for mere reactions, myself included. I love arguing about F. Scott Fitzgerald's work. He makes my skin crawl.
Even if this phenomenon remains among students and filters out of them through time - the time when they are no longer hot-headed students, obviously - I still believe in breaking mother's golden rule when it's necessary, like, for an honors project. But no worries, Mother, I'll try to be elloquent.

In Billy Collin's Poetry 180, I read a most beautiful poem by Robley Wilson called "I Wish in the City of Your Heart." It's short, sensual, odd... and it excited me to read more. However, Billy must have picked the best of Robley Wilson, and the book I chose must have been either the leftover sludge or have misplaced its informative foreward, explaining why war was a main theme and why the author felt obliged to write on concentration camps and other subjects which I seriously question as personal experience. Maybe it's just my student taste, but I can believe in a poem when the poet makes it personal. You don't have to write a war story to capture my attention or sympathy or heart; you merely have to write a few beautiful words like Wilson did in "I Wish in the City of Your Heart." If I wasn't so ignorant on copyright laws, I'd lay out this fantastic poems right here, right now; I love it that much.

But Everything Paid For, Robley Wilson's 1999 collection of poetry, hurt me to read.

Wait, that's not elloquent enough for Mother.

Everything Paid For had many elements/techniques that made me groan and throw the book to the floor, which is truthful but still not elloquent. Sorry, Mother.

Oh my God, Lindsay gets to see Sufjan Stevens in concert in St. Louis in September and she just now told me. I have to check the internet to see if I can still get tickets and go. Oh man, I have to see Sufjan.
Sorry, I'll finish later. This is Sufjan we're talking about.

-Jess