Iowa

In Iowa they grow poets, their biggest export. Some people say they are our nation's most important untapped energy source, others say they huddle together too much, picking lice off their bodies, fooling yokels with pyramid schemes built out of avant garde poetics and snake oil. In the poet fields, pretending to be a scarecrow, you can hear them rustle toward the coasts, wherever the MLA Conference is, wherever a university wants to peel them back, lather them with butter, and feed them to the undergrads. But no one's going to ever get full on them.