THE ART OF WRITING BOTH SHOCKING AND PROFOUND POETRY

How to Make Your Reader Laugh Until They Accidentally Have a Spiritual Experience

Let's get one thing straight: if your poetry doesn't occasionally make your mother uncomfortable, you're probably doing it wrong. But—and this is the important part—if all it does is shock, you're just a teenager scribbling penis drawings on a bathroom wall. Art requires both the sacred and the profane, preferably in the same sentence.

THE GOSPEL OF INAPPROPRIATE JUXTAPOSITION

The secret sauce of profound-yet-shocking poetry is placing things together that have no business being neighbors. Like seating the Pope next to a sentient vibrator at a dinner party. The resulting conversation might be uncomfortable, but it will definitely be memorable.

Try this: Take the most serious subject you can think of—death, God, the void that awaits us all—then describe it using the language of something trivial: reality TV, fast food, or Internet memes. Or reverse it: approach something mundane with the reverence usually reserved for religious experiences.