State Fair

Suppose we crown our symphony,

Hecate’s Symphony—‘On the

Genuine In Art’—with some

Old growth sour apples, grandma

Style. Suppose we pronounce the day dead

At dawn, kaput, finis, finished.

Rain all day, my friends, a wash out.

Suppose we market some saliva soap,

—Eh?—sell it as ‘The French Kiss’,

Salubrious Soft Skin—and then,

Suppose we issue a solemn nihil obstat:

Fat Fannies Permitted on Fair Grounds—

Only. That should keep the church ladies

Satisfied. And then suppose we spark

A tryst between you and me—

Not for Eros this time, and not for love

Of God—or for the love of Pete—

For Christ sakes—in fact it’s not

For anything, simple or solemn.

Simply put and solemnly said,

Suppose we propose a nihil obstat

Of and for everything… everything

Under the big top, that is. Thus:

“What is death in the circus?

That depends on if it is spring.

Then, if elephants are there,

mon pere, we are not completely lost.”

Calliope Grieves

1.

The crowd looks up. It seems so rude. Spotlights

Search through the audience. He looks okay,

This ‘professor’, as he comes to the mike.

The tux looks new. Think James Mason here, not

Brando. Oleaginous, perhaps, but not

The first ‘overly sophisticated’

Curriculum Vitae to dance for us.

A-one, a-two, a-one, two three—

Got that? Go…

I’m running. Like the god is darkness and

The lights go out. A kind of stunned silence,

As one and all whisper: that’s it? That end,

It sounded like poetry. But way too short

And minimalist, minimalist in

Extremis, we all think. In the worst way:

‘Borges, Pessoa, Kierkegaard,’ he’d said.

‘All of them giants and all of them dead.’

And then the lights went out. And running feet.

Poetry about poetry and poetry about hunger

I too, dislike it, Marianne Moore writes in a poem she simply called Poetry: as if sensing the ensuing fate of poetry is to be genuinely ignored—but offers a quick apologia: poetry is a place for the genuine, she insists. It is useful.

One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not pretty,
nor till the poets among us can be
“literalists of
the imagination”–above
insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, imaginary gardens with real toads in them, shall we have

it. 

 One is tempted to discount such things despite the good writing. Yes, an imaginary garden with real toads is one of the better characterizations of a poem, but we have real problems in this world, why spend a single iota of time worrying about, you know, meta-poetry? Like, if you can’t find something serious to write about…

Listen however to what William Carlos Williams is telling his wife:

My heart rouses

          thinking to bring you news

                    of something

that concerns you

          and concerns many men.  Look at

                    what passes for the new.

You will not find it there but in

          despised poems.

                    It is difficult

to get the news from poems

          yet men die miserably every day

                    for lack

of what is found there.

         

Landing fresh on the planet from Mars, one would want to know more about this thing called a ‘poem’—despised or not. Let’s try another one: