Poetry

Give me women, wine and snuff
Until I cry out hold, enough!
You may do so sans objection
Till the day of resurrection;
For bless my beard they aye shall be
My beloved Trinity.

--Keats

 

Fuck Keats.




An Irish Airman Foresees His Death by W.B. Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above:
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love:
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.

 

Things fall apart, Zeke. The center does not hold.

 

Pallister pretty much captures it as far as my attitude towards poetry.

It's pretty sad that I have more intimate knowledge of noted poet laureate Luther Campbell than I do Whitman, Emerson, Thoreau, Joyce, Ginsburg, Keats, etc., combined.

Put Her In The Buck, indeed.

Oh and for the haiku boys?

Fuck Haiku in butt
Make it beg for sweet release
Haiku hatred burns

 

I never got into poetry much until I read Edward Arlington Robinson. For me, "Richard Cory" is standard reading. The beat poets are worth reading as well, especially Dylan Thomas.

 

Without poetry, I'm not a writer, pure and simple. I was thirteen and had to do a school project, using magazine illustrations and photos to illustrate a collection pf poetry. At that point, apart from Casey at the Bat, my literary horizons ended at "The Baseball Life of Mickey Mantle."

My older brother gave me steered me to Langston Hughes. Who knows why, but I read this poem:

Suicide's Note

The calm cool
face of the river
asked me for a kiss.

Boom. That's it, satori, I was done, finished, hooked on language and my life changed. I still get chills reading it.

There should have been no way that me, a white kid in the middle of nowhere with zero literary background whose parents never read a book should ever, ever, ever have connected with the work of an urban black poet of a previous generation. But language and experience really are universal. I read more Hughes, then read about Hughes, then read who he read, and his contemporaries, then read who they read and their contemporaries, always pulling at the thread, and, as my sig says, "When the water runs cold, that's it." When I got into high school every week I took the five or six bucks I'd saved up from cleaning toilets, drove into Big City to a used bookstore and would spend the whole day there deciding what to buy. Out of high school I got a scholarship under one of the best poetry teachers in the country, and almost forty years later, although I write prose for money, without poetry I'd never bother. Back in the day I ran informal workshops, readings, and other public poetry events, putting poetry before people who otherwise would never have bothered, sometimes reading to hundreds of people. Now part of me can't wait to get retired so I can spend more time with it. However, without that first poem...

If approaching a single poet is too daunting, and it can be, try these anthologies:

The Voice that is Great Within Us
A Controversy of Poets
Norton Anthology
News of the Universe
Rattle Bag

There are many others, find one poem that speaks to you, then follow that writer to others.

And if you have a chance, listen to poetry spoken, or even prose, by the writer. There's tons of Kerouac now available (I remember when they were sold as bootlegs under the counter at City Lights),and it gives the work an entire added dimension, lifts it right off the page, terrific reader. These are several big collections out with CDs of the poets reading - although some can't read, the good ones are unforgettable - Theodore Roethke comes to mind - a great one who I read, put down, read, put and read and put down dozens of times before he clicked after I finally heard him reading.

I think the aversion so many have to poetry is one of exposure, the way schools try to deliver poetry makes it seem remote and too complicated, when its actually the exact opposite - it's intimate and simple.

 

"Let me put my poems in you" by Chazz Michael Michaels.

 

leaves of grass can go
suck my dick and kiss my ass
me so walden pond