Poetry, Sheer Poetry

Several months ago now I went online to take a poetry I.Q. test. One of the components is that I had to submit a poem of my own to the people at Poetry.Com. For those of you who are uninitiated, Poetry.Com is one of these organizations that would publish breakfast cereal ingredients if someone submitted it to them under the guise of it being "poetry." Everyone is a winner, and the poems always get published--and you don't have to buy one, but wouldn't you love to see your poem published in a leatherbound book-with gold plating on the page edges that you can show all your friends?

Anyway, I wanted them to process my results to the very legitimate quiz on the constructs and techniques of poetry, but I couldn't do it without them "assessing" one of my own works for merit. So, I submitted a poem to which I feel no overt attachment, that I will never try to publish elsewhere, etc. Well, you'll be glad to know that it was heralded as an "excellent" poem (on their rating scale of "not bad," "pretty good," and "excellent"-- at least I imagine that's what it must be), and will I grant them permission to publish it in one of their leather-bound volumes? I didn't return their permissions form, so now it seems that I won the editor's choice award, and they want to record it on a cd!!!

I'll just keep throwing out their follow-up material, but it's worth the hassle. I got a 10 out of 11 on the I.Q. portion of the test. It seems that my grad school dreams are well-founded.