Comments

When I post prose, I get comments. When I post verse, I don't. What does this mean?

Anyway, here's a prose query. There's an awful lot of blank verse out there on the internet--Paradise Lost. All of Shakespeare's plays. Thompson's The Seasons. The Ring and the Book. But if you type "blank verse poem" into Google, one of the things you get, on the very first page, is my poem "A Short Course in Theology" on this blog. Why? (Not that I'm complaining. An awful lot of people find their way here in just that manner. No word on how disappointed they are when they arrive.)

An Ars Poetica

He bade them sit and watch from cozy chairs.
Rabbit, he said, and there it was, a jugged
Hare, for the coarse of palate. He said, Sun!
And into the room his kid slouched. "What up, Pops?"
This isn't a piece of cake, he told them. There,
Right on the rug, synthetic, hard as brass,
A slice of apricot pie declared itself.
Poets do magic. What they want is sense,
He said. A copper spray of pennies sailed
Lustily round the room, harboring on
The children's shoulders. Not no other word,
The poet shouted: ungrammatically,
Their room, and all and everyone, was gone,
And he alone was left to tell some tale.

Out of Sequence

Atonement over, now comes autumn.
First contrition, then the fall.

Over at

one of the very-impressed-with-itself Poetry Places posters are listing what's currently on their desks. Such a list. You should be such a Scholar-Mensch. Everyone is reading Yeats and Dante and Beowulf and The Complete Works of Bertran de Born. They are glancing through Cavafy and Murasaki and Seamus Heaney. They are idling away their non-ode-ing hours with Homer and Propertius and the untranslated Manilius and memorizing The Mutabilitie Cantos.

None of them is reading Elmore Leonard's new novel. They do not mention James Lee Burke or Charles McCarry or Philip Roth or Joseph Heller. They can't be bothered with Trollope or early Dickens. They spit on The Reivers and Sanctuary. Joseph Andrews? Scenes from a Clerical Life? Shamela? The Bab Ballads? I don't think so. They've got Buddenbrooks to think about.

I don't know which would be worse, if I believed them or if I didn't. If the first, they are prigs; if the second, poseurs. Anyway, I can't think about them anymore. I've got a velvet painting of Mickey Spillane to finish.

More poems, fewer poets

I'm told there is another new Best American Poetry out*. This means another surge in chatter about poets and clique of poets and schools of poets** and departments of poets and incestuous poet-y relations***. And so on. And so on. And scooby dooby dooby. All I have to say is, Ooh sha sha.

I just don't care about these poets and their lives. Not until the booksellers hire Dr Johnson to write brief biographical prefaces to collections of their poems. If you want to get my attention****, tell me, not about the poets, but about the poems. I don't care if there are major defects in these poets' characters. If they wear their knickers on their heads and snort Cheez Whiz, I can live with that. If their poems aren't good, I won't be thinking about them anyway; if their poems are good, I'll forgive them almost anything.***** Point me at the good poems, and tell me anything you think I should know about why you think they're good. Or tell me they're bad poems, and warn me off.

But for God's sake, talk about the poems and leave the poets alone. Or at least move them to the back of the line.

RHE
* I don't care all that much, because I know from the start that it's fatally deficient--i.e., none of my poems is in it.

**As though such poets were krill. Could be, I suppose.

***As though they were Lots of poets.

**** And my guess is you don't. Or, to be more precise, you don't give a shit whether you do or not.

*****Time that with this strange excuse/Pardons Kipling and his views, etc., etc.

You never know, do you?

Today someone arrived at this blog by performing a Google search for "tapir fucking at the zoo." Wonder what he was hoping for.

Why do fools fall in love?

What holds message boards together is the need for praise. For all the blather about how poets just want straightforward criticism so that they can grow (you can do the same thing at The House of Pies, and it tastes better) (are there still Houses of Pie?), what they really want is acclamation. So they forum shop till they find a place where other posters either like what they write or are willing to say they like it, in exchange for reciprocal tub-thumping.

Anyone reading through poetry websites/message boards/forums will find himself saying over and over again, "Anyone who likes that would like okra boiled with Gummi Bears." But the answer is pretty obvious, really: today's gushee is tomorrow's gusher. And in the end, the love you take is equal to the love you make. Workshop-wise.

It's a nicely-nice thing, I suppose: a place for everyone in the internet poetry universe; and if the stomach sometimes recoils when drivel is overpraised, well, our turns will come, too, when we have found the right foster family----change places, and handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?

What about Gutenberg?

One of my poems appeared this week in an online journal. It looks fine; the "magazine" itself is neither better nor worse than the print outlets in which my poems more commonly appear; and the editors deserve thanks for their doubtlessly unremunerative devotion to the art. But for us sons and daughters of print, there is something oddly unsatisfying about e-journals and online publication. It seems so ephemeral and provisional. (No offense to that other magisterial symbol of our times, The Shit Creek Review.)

I know this is illogical of me. Scholars, fans of poetry, and potential biographers are not going into Widener, browsing through bound back volumes of the DeKalb Literary Arts Journal or Phoebe in the hope of finding a dimly remembered poem of mine. And yet. And yet. They could. Is the same going to be true of my latest electronic incarnation?

Variations

Many beginning prosodists treat metrical variations as though they were vermin: find them, identify them, then ruthlessly exterminate them. But variations are neither good nor bad in themselves; they are only prosodic tools. All that matters is how they're used and whether they work. When you've noticed that Shakespeare's

What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? racks? fires? what flaying? boiling?
In leads or oils? what old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst?

is not perfectly regular, your analysis has only begun, not concluded. Too often, though, I see "critiques" which are little more than lists of metrical variations, as though they were spelling errors, and the critic had performed some regulatory action by ferreting them out. I usually respond with some reference to Milton's

Rocks, Caves, Lakes, Fens, Bogs, Dens, and shades of death[,]

since critiquers are a tad hesitant to claim either that every other word must be stressed or that Milton didn't know what he was doing. (They may think, "If only he'd had access to The Gaz," but they aren't quite brave enough to say it.)

Dear Good-Hearted, Fan-like Correspondent,

Thanks for the suggestion that I talk more about myself, that I reveal more--what do I read, what do I eat, what do I drink, who do I know, who do I do, what do I listen to, what was I like as a obnoxious, precocious whippersnapper, how many bedrooms in my house, how many frozen toaster waffles in the fridge, how do I like my steak, that sort of thing. I have considered your request in the generous, earnest spirit it was made.

No.

Every Mother's Song

Born with teeth, a caul, a head of hair,
 marked for great things,
Is anybody there
 to hear the mother as she sings,

Unto me is born, is born, here, a child?
 The same starfall
Spattered a desert, wild
 forest predators saw it all.

He now pays bills, she irons out disputes.
 No one here sings
To the naked men, suits
 of skin, cold miraculous things.

Apart from You

I've never been particularly happy with this poem, but I don't get all that many requests, so, Shirley, I dug it out of the filing cabinet.

Apart from you, there have been none.
Yes, I have stared. I looked at one
who walked like leaves caught in a breeze.
I pictured this, remembered these.
Piffle. Trifles. Bagatelles.
Our bed at night remembers, tells
me more than I should know. It makes
too little noise. I wake. It wakes
shadows of colors, and once a light,
though briefly, shook apart the night.
I must be done. I am undone
apart from you. There have been none.

Plot

Assume a woman. There she sits, bemused,
already knowing she has been assumed.
Women do, mostly. She lifts her long hair
and lets it fall, half flirting, half fatigued.

Assume an incident, the victim slumped
against your hedge, holding himself together.
The cops have come. The perp has fled. You can
assume the rain will not efface the blood,
though something will, if you can hang around.

Picture the telephone. It is prepared
to ring, whether it rings today or not.
If no one calls, you can pick up your phone
to see if it's still working. But it is.

Assume the central man. If vectors run
from woman through the phone to accident,
he'll light them up at night. And if they don't,
he can propose the sense of why they should.
It falls together, when you reach the end.

Sauce for the gander

Someone referred to me a website posting "formalist poetry by women." Folks have been trying to enlighten me for years, but I must be ineducable: it just hasn't worked. I still don't understand why such places and labels aren't offensive. You know, don't you, that if someone opened a site dedicated to "formalist poetry by men," it would be booed, hissed, reviled, and castigated for being openly, blatantly sexist. (It also would be ignored, but that's a different problem.) Why is this different?

I welcome answers, you know, though if they consist of little more than "you troglodytic brute," I'll just delete them.

Something He Probably Should Have Seen

Early Epstein. As I've often noted, it can be difficult to look over work from a long time ago. And a bit confusing. Is it the poems which we outgrew, superseded in skill and command, or is it merely that we've changed--not necessarily improved--so that what interested or impressed us once does so no longer? This seems to me to hold up better than most of what I was writing then. It appeared in the British magazine Seam.


It was all there and then all gone.
There must have been a time at which
he didn't see the warning signs--
the drop in temperature in rooms
he entered or the shabby food,
sentimental occasions they
let slip by or slept through. When he
himself awoke and found the house
empty, the children gone, the dogs
gone too, their snapped chains on the ground,
the weeds knee high, the weather changed,
one of the cars absconded with,
the battery of the other dead,
he figured he had overlooked
something he probably should have seen.

Dumb runs wild

The poetry boards I read and where I sometimes post seem to have collapsed in a heap of stupidity, meanness, spite, recrimination, and sheer incompetence, as though everyone simultaneously had said, "I can't take it any more! All this trying to be intelligent and artistic, well read, well mannered, and literate--it's just not me, and I give it up! Let the real me flow!"

And flow it has. It turns out everyone has pretty much hated everyone else all along, and they didn't really like poetry all that much either. Many of them actually seem to resent poems, as though poetry were an imposition on their time and a burden on their attention. With some of them, that comes as a surprise. Others? Not so much.

2 More Epigrams

from The Greek Anthology

I lie here waiting, while this small hole mends.
I lie here waiting. Waiting never ends.



And Then There Fell

No she so fair as his,
alarming in the spring.
So fair, such joy in this,
none needs no other thing,
not he. He had her all.
Then summer changed to fall.
How could it have been so?
And then there fell the snow.

And Monsters Underneath the Bed

The prince of darkness keeps a nightlight on,
Casper the friendly ghost, Count Chocula
The sweet undead, or Spiderman the lord
Of flies.  It helps him when the shadows grow
A second head or look like Angela,
So white, her bodice and her breasts are one
Insipid sight.  No princess for the prince
Who keeps his favorite souls in coffee cans
Along with his loose change.  They make a sound
Like pinto beans or minute rice.  He thwarts
His nightmares with the songs of nursery school.
Last time he was in hell, he took a snack—
A juicebox and his favorite fruit, handpicked.
Tonight he can smell ashes on his breath
And hear a jewsharp twanging where his chest
Would be if he were more conventional.
A flashlight underneath the blanket helps,
But not that much, too much to know, too soon.

And So to Bed

     This is a really old poem.   It appeared in the Ball State University Forum.


To dinner we had Paul and Sam, my bosses,
and their young blonded wives (acquired lately,
at no small charge of alimony, losses
of stock and children, both lamented greatly).
The trout was awful—thawed a bit and breaded.
Sam said he knew where corporately we’re headed
(to hell, he thinks).  Paul never says too much.
He drank almost two bottles of my best
French white bordeaux; I thought he looked a touch
green towards the end.  His wife was tightly dressed,
skirt slit to the thigh (which, nudging against mine,
made me uncomfortable, what with the wine).
Michelle wore her blue denim suit, of course.
She looks less like a preppie than a horse
after a couple joints.  I thinks she keeps
me back, of which Paul’s drinking is a sign.
Then, much as always, after all departed,
she starts to strip.  And here the poor tears started
(her fists curl up and shudder when she weeps).
I might have been gentler in what I said.
A final cigarette.  And so to bed.

2X

The stones evince no brogue, the skyline not
A trace of paddy, taters, or the wee
Dear men in funny shoes and buckled hats.
Vikings, you say? A pyre burns the night,
Which helps me read this ATM. I've no
Experience of euros, and I falter.
Never you mind. A lacerated heart,
A kidney grilled for breakfast: these are good
Solid attractions. Phonics stroll the park,
The poteen in them brewing up a storm;
And maybe help will come from God or Spain,
And Pizza Place, just up the street, delivers.
But not from evil, nor from cheesy bits.
These are the incidents of life and faith
From which we cannot flee, though packaged tours
Offer us, all-included, to new homes,
Good homes like these, which never flinch, stood stone
On stone, until they proffer us the bread
Of Liffey. Maybe then this hole will fill,
The betting shops acknowledge their defeat,
The rain-peeled townhomes open colored doors.