There is a peculiar comfort in believing that poetry can be built like furniture. A hammer here, a metaphor there, tighten the imagery, polish the rhythm, and voilà: a masterpiece, factory-sealed and ready for applause.
Madam Chetta’s essay About That Toolbox is the latest homage to this illusion. With admirable confidence, she rolls out her craftsman’s bench, assuring the poetic world that Shakespeare’s sunlit Juliet is not a miracle, but the result of properly applied tools. The tragedy is not that she believes this. The tragedy is that she attempts to extend this mechanical vision to my Impossible Manual, a text that, by its very breath, is a war cry against such reductionism.
She could not even spell my name correctly. And yet she feels entitled to interpret my work. Let me be blunt: if you cannot respect the letters that build a name, you are in no position to dissect the letters that build a poem.
I have read your essay, Miss Chetta, in which the toolbox is elevated, even sanctified, as the key to poetic excellence. You suggest that mastering the mechanical elements: the imagery, meter, device, metaphor, is what transforms a limp “Julie, I love you” into Shakespeare’s blazing sun.
I firmly reject that framing.
I write not as a craftsman assembling kits, but as someone who walks through the ruins of certainty, breathing in the debris of what language cannot hold. Your toolbox, dear Chetta, is real, and essential for those who wish to imitate poetry. But it is powerless in the face of what creates poetry.
The Impossible Manual is not a curriculum. It is a map of places where the toolbox shatters, where your chisel breaks, your ruler bends, and your sandpaper peels off in shame.
You speak of mediocrity and excellence as if they are destinations reached by following instructions. You see a path lined with manuals. I see a chasm. You point to the difference between a whisper and a blaze and believe it’s a matter of craftsmanship. I tell you: Shakespeare did not consult diagrams to make Juliet the sun. He watched the world burn until only that light remained, and language combusted on its own glow.
Your essay is not wrong in praising form, rhythm, and imagery. But it is disastrously blind to the fracture beneath: the skeleton of failure, the refusal of control, the moment when poetry begins precisely because the tools fail.
I did not write The Impossible Manual to teach devices. I wrote it to indict them. My chapters are not tutorials; they are elegies for tools that betrayed me when meaning trembled and collapsed. These tools are only loyal when poetry stays obedient. But real poetry... real poetry is a rebellion. It erupts.
You offer solace in structure. I offer defiance in silence.
You polish your lines until they gleam under workshop lamps. I write with the electricity of storms. Your toolbox can produce poems that are perfect corpses: beautiful, intact, untouchable. I am interested in poems that bleed. That shake. That disintegrate the reader’s comfort.
My Impossible Manual is for those who write knowing form cannot save them. For those who hold the pen, and realize the pen is trembling, inadequate, yet still they write. These are my readers, not the factory apprentices, but the grave-diggers of language.
So yes, Chetta, use your toolbox. Build your polished metaphors. But know this: my manual is not for assembly. It is for dismantling. Where your tools no longer reach, mine begins. Excellence is not born from technique; it is born from the courage to name the unnameable, to write when the very act is absurd, impossible, necessary.
And next time you wish to debate my ideas, spell my name correctly. If we cannot even agree on the letters, how can we dare to discuss the silences between them?
Florin Lacatus
(The One Who Knows That Hammers Are Useless Against Silence)