You'll never make a living writing poetry, not if you're any good at it. That's what my professor/mentor Jeff Carson always used to say. So I knew I must have been doing something right because I hadn't made a dime off any poem I'd ever written in the last fifteen years. I had a job at the city college teaching Preparatory Poetry, a class for students who didn't have the skills for Poetry Composition 101. My students were the ones that if you asked them to recite an Emily Dickinson quatrain they would look at you like you'd just asked them to play Lady of Spain on a plastic comb/wax paper kazoo. In my last lesson on simile I gave the class an assignment to write a simile after a prompt of HEIGHT. One of my students turned in She was as tall as a six foot pine tree.

Literary journals pay writers with a copy of the magazine you appeared in and, sometimes, a one year subscription. I always kidded myself that my poems had been read by the other 500 subscribers to a magazine, knowing full well that none of them did—because I too had never read a single poem by anyone else in one. This was how I came to receive the summer edition of Southwestern American Poetry magazine; I'd been published in the spring edition. It sat with the rest of my mail on my coffee table until three days after its arrival, when I came home from work to find my girlfriend Annette, sitting on the couch, reading it.

"Shh," she said as I walked in through the door.

"I didn't say anything."

"Shh."

"Very good," she said, closing the magazine and dropping it to the table. "The lines are evocative and have a sort of natural, unforced meter. I can really see your influence on him, he's taking your advice well."

"Natural meter, huh?" I said picking the magazine up. "Which one of my students is it?"

"Not student. Your drinking buddy Matt," Annette said, rising up off the sofa to give me a greeting kiss.

"What!" I shrieked, dodging her. "You gotta be kidding me!" I flipped to the contributor notes in the back. MATT SNYDER is a cab driver living in Tucson, Arizona. These are his first published poems. "Poems! He has more than one in here?" In the previous issue, I had only a single poem. I flipped to the page that was headed with FOUR SONNETS FROM MATT SNYDER and underneath that were four poems consisting of 14 lines. If the poems had been terrible, I could have endured them. Annette was right, they read well—although they could hardly be called sonnets. He totally blew the Shakespearean sonnet rhyming scheme. Two of the poems broke Carson's rule of never beginning a poem with "I" and one of the poems was about a dog. A dog! Only neophytes write poems about dogs.

Matt and I first met about a year ago at The Prospector, a dive bar in Tucson. I had dismissed class early that day after one of my students had recited her tenth poem of the semester about her angry breasts and a lack of love from her mother. We were the only two in the bar all night and when I told him I was a poetry professor he told me that he dabbled in poetry. "Poetry is nothing to be dabbled in," I said, swaying on my bar stool, and asked him if he even knew what an iamb was. He didn't, and I explained one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable: "a-BOVE." "at-TEMPT." until the bartender began shooting me annoyed looks. At 1 AM I was too drunk to walk home and I said I was going to get an Uber.

"I'm a cab driver," Matt said, barely able to stay atop his own bar stool.

"No you're not," I said. "Really?"

"Says so right here on the card," he declared, handing me a business card that said NEED A RIDE? CALL MATT! COURTEOUS TAXI SERVICE! with his cell phone number.

"Are taxis even a thing anymore?" I asked.

"Not much of one. Wait here. I'm parked out back where no one can see it. I'll bring it around."

He came around on the wrong side of the street to pick me up in front of the bar and I got in directly behind him, giving him my address and directions. The cigarette ashes he was flicking out his window hit me in the face. When we got to my apartment he said he was too drunk to drive and asked if he could crash with me. I gave him the couch and we've been drinking buddies ever since.

I read the poems through a couple of more times while Annette reheated the lasagna that I had cooked last night. I tossed the magazine onto the kitchen table as we sat down to eat.

"Well? What did you think?" she asked.

"Crapola," I said. "Herky jerky lines, failed rhyme schemes, no uplift or reveal. I'm just biased against bad writing, I guess."

"Or you're just jealous of good writing," she said, passing me garlic bread. "They're good. Why can't you just admit it?"

She was giving me that same look she gave me back when we were in Carson's class and I would go after a fellow student claw and fang in the workshops. Every student in the class tried to stick a "red wheelbarrow" in their poems, making for contrived verse written for no other reason than to avoid the wrath of Professor Carson. On our first day of class Carson went around the room asking each of us which Whitman poem was our favorite and then he told each of us why we were wrong (except for Joy Eastman who said she didn't have a favorite Whitman poem because she'd never read him).

"Good? Good like what? Like they can cure cancer? Like throw a 40 yard touchdown pass with seconds to go in the game?"

"Good as in executed with clarity and vigorousness without pretension or falsity," she said. "Are you going to The Prospector tonight? Tell him how much you like them."

Indeed, I had planned on going to the bar that night like I usually did on Tuesday nights. Matt was there nearly every night, usually drinking alone unless I came in. I think I was the only person who could put up with him. He'd never told me that he submitted poems for publication and I wanted to take my contributor's copy of SAP and plop on the bar in front of him to see what he had to say. It was a thirty minute walk from our apartment to the bar. I made it in fifteen minutes. Matt was there, I set the magazine between him and his shot of tequila.

"Hey! I was starting to wonder if anybody read these damn things. Did you like them?"

"Why didn't you tell me you were submitting your poems?"

"I didn't think they'd get published. What did you think of them? Do you think they're all right?"

"A Shakespearean sonnet has a very specific rhyme scheme. Without it, it's not a sonnet."

"Shakespearean? No, those were Petrarchan sonnets."

Shit. How could I have missed that? I guess I never thought he had ever even heard of Francesco Petrarca and his sonnets. "Oh. Well, Petrarchan sonnets went out of style a long time ago," I said, reasserting my place in our mentor/mentee relationship. "Did you ever read that Robert Lowell collection I told you about?" I asked, changing the subject.

"Yeah, but I didn't like it. I couldn't understand half of what he said and the other half was so boring I just skipped past it. You know who's good? Billy Collins. That fucker cracks me up! You know who else? Charles Bukowski. I mean, he's not funny, well, he is sometimes, but mostly he just writes about real life." He slammed the shot of tequila and chased it with a gulp of Corona. "I've got a few other poems I've been working on. Not sonnets. Regular stuff."

"You mean free verse."

"Yeah, that. I'd like if you could read them, you know, maybe tell me what you think. I mean, they're nothing special. If you have time. Not right now, of course. But like maybe after you get home or something."

I skipped going to The Prospector for the next two weeks. Matt had given me six poems on sheets of printer paper folded into quarters. They were printed on an ink jet printer with cartridges I imagined he refilled himself. They were good poems, the kind I'd even give high grades to my students for. In fact I found myself trying to steal a few of his lines and jam them into a couple of the poems I was working on at the time. The thing with poetry is that it's so subjective you can judge any poem you look at as either good or bad depending on what subjective criteria you wanted to measure it by. These cab driver poems were good no matter how I looked at them. I got drunk. I canceled class the next day. The Kenyon Review arrived that morning in the mail, and inside were three more poems by Matt Snyder. I got drunk again and canceled class again the next day to visit my former professor Jeff Carson.

Carson had retired at the end of the last school year and I took a chance that he would be in his ratty apartment and awake at 1 in the afternoon. I knocked and his reply was instant.

"What do you want?!"

"It's me, Lew," I said, then realizing he might not remember me and might be drunk added, "Lew McYntire." There was some unintelligible grumbling and the door jerked open.

He looked at me for a few seconds. "Oh, you. Lew. Come on in."

He was giving off vapors of bourbon and beer, his apartment reeked of stale bedsheets. He hurried to his coffee table, cluttered with fast food bags and beer cans to slam his laptop shut—but not before I noticed Pornhub.com on the screen. He plopped on the couch and propped his feet among the chaos of his coffee table and said, "Who are you today?" a gruff greeting he often shared with his students, a take off from "How are you today?" where he expected you to justify the incongruent writing you had shown him the day before. The out-at-the-knees gray sweatpants and the white v-neck t-shirt with yellow armpits and food stains down the front told me he was a few days into one of his benders.

"A poet from academia," I said.

He crossed his arms over his chest and nodded his head which meant proceed.

I told him about the poem writing cab driver, my barroom mentoring, and my Green-Eyed Monster at his success. "He's got three poems in the latest Kenyon Review."

"Fuck the Kenyon Review," he said. "Nothing but a bunch of stale, risk free crap."

"They're good. Real good. Would you like to see them?" I held out the magazine, opened to Matt's poems. He snatched it from me. He read through them once, and then read them again while running his index finger along the lines. That meant he liked them.

"Well, what do you know. They finally published something worth a shit. You met this guy in a bar? And he's never taken a poetry class?"

"The guy's never set foot on a college campus."

"I used to get paid to teach people like you to ruin perfectly good paper with crap verse. The worst thing about it is that you can not teach someone who wants to be a writer. You can only teach someone who wants to write."

Those two sentences were in the preface to his book The Art and Game of Writing Poetry. It was a depressing book, throwing cold water on the flame of wannabe poets who think they are destined for greatness. A lot of it stung me because I was guilty of much of the pretension he mentioned in the book—joining writing groups, talking about writing more than actually writing, and hero worship. Also in his book: "The most profound observations in life are unsayable. That's why we write poetry."

"And it looks like," he said, tapping Matt's poems, "this guy wants to write." He tossed the magazine back to me. "Whatever happened to that girl you were with? Ann or Anna or something."

"Annette. She doesn't write poetry anymore. She's a lab technician with a biotech company now."

"Yep. Good writers quit when they see their limitations while bad writers keep pounding along until they get a book deal. I always liked her stuff," he said, twisting the cap off his whiskey bottle and taking a sip.

I stood up to leave, taking notice of the burst capillaries on his nose. There were a lot more than there used to be. He set the whiskey bottle down and fired up a joint without offering me a hit. I just left him there in his Gen-X lazytude without a parting salutation.

That night in bed after a dinner of delivery pizza (it was my turn to cook but I didn't have the energy for it) I stared up at the ceiling while Annette turned over onto her side and yanked the chain on the nightstand lamp after a half hour of reading The Bell Jar, her favorite book of poetry. "You asleep?" I whispered.

"Of course not," she said without moving.

"How come you stopped writing?" I asked. She didn't answer. I waited. "You were the best in class. You made it look so easy. Why did you stop?"

"Words on paper are a depiction of life. I want to live life."

* * *

It was another month of Tuesdays before I made it back to The Prospector. Matt was there at his usual stool, staring up at the close captioned TV above the bar—Corona and shot of tequila in front of him. I carried in the six poems he had given me, still folded in quarters, and set them down on the bar next to his beer bottle.

"There you are, buddy," he said. "Long time no see. I thought you abandoned me. Did you read 'em?" he asked, pointing at the folded papers on the bar, his nose glowing red.

"Why didn't you tell me the Kenyon Review accepted your poems?"

"I didn't want to jinx it. I kept thinking they were going to yank them. Were they any good?"

"They're in the Kenyon. Of course they're good. Where else have you submitted?"

"Shit, I sent stuff everywhere. Just those two accepted me. Do you think I should keep sending stuff out?"

Just then I remembered Colonel Higginson telling Emily Dickinson that she should not publish her poems, that they weren't ready yet. I'd spent more than the last year pointing out the supposed flaws in Matt's writing when all along he was a better writer than me. "Of course you should send your stuff out. It's good."

"Really? Thanks a lot, buddy. Can I buy you a drink?"

"Sure," I said.

"Can you lend me twenty bucks?"

I glared a few seconds before he laughed and said, "I kid, I kid."

He picked his six poems up off the bar, and said, "Lew, tell me, honestly, what did you think of these?" stuffing them in his jacket pocket.

"My old college professor said writing good poetry is more a matter of what not to do than what to do. He said rule number one was avoid cliches. No poems about the stars, the sea, the moon, or dead mothers. And the other rule number one was don't be a metaphor moron. Like no such thing as a towel of snow. You definitely have rule number one down, both of them. And the poems were executed with clarity and vigorousness." Annette was always right. "They're good poems, Matt. I liked them."

The bartender brought me my bottle of Bud Light and Matt paid for it from the bills he had lying next to his shot glass.

"So now it's my turn to ask you a question," I said. "What makes a good poem?"

"You're asking me?"

That was exactly what I expected him to say. I offered no clarification. "What makes a good poem?"

"Well, shit. I don't know. I always just listen to my poem. It'll tell me if it's ready or not," Matt said.

"You listen to your poem?"

"Yeah. It'll tell you when it's ready to fly on its own. Keep listening and scribbling until it says it's time."

"What?"

"Seriously. That's it. You have to let the poem tell you."

Hugh Blanton is the author of A Home to Crouch In. He has appeared in numerous journals and reviews and can be reached on Twitter @HughBlanton5.