Poetry

                      Three Words

Fuck being a poet, man.

Fuck all their bloody categorical adjectives;

fuck their jamming the horrors of my existence

into something so small and simple

that they can encapsulate it

in a single word

with baggage that isn’t mine.

Three words that give me the creeps,

and a bit of a shudder when I hear them,

are ‘poetry’ ‘poem’ and ‘poet’.

They bring forth eerie flashbacks

of an age when life was wretched,

and I escaped through this game with words

that was fun and kinda easy.

They evoke a time when I decided

that what people called poems and poets

really were the effete posturing stereotypes

that comedians mock,

and that the people in the poetry racket, including me,

were really running an ongoing scam

with tacit agreement not to acknowledge collectively

how fucking boring our self-preciousness really was,

because that would wreck our front

and keep those who were doing so

from making their game.

I can tolerate little

of what people present to the world as poetry,

and I suppose this makes things mutual,

as I’ve presented my verse compositions,

which I refuse to call poetry,

to audiences that seem to me

to be mostly on different wavelengths

to mine in any way that matters.

                Bob Said It

The Japanese architects

of the wabi-sabi school

have long contended

that the creation of a structure

is never completed,

because each time anyone experiences one

it is

what that person is

experiencing just then,

which depends on

its age,

the time of day,

the season,

the weather,

the person,

that person’s mood,

and stuff like that.

I agree.

It’s not the object or the sound or the words –

art, like beauty,

exists within the soul of the beholder.

In a 1966 interview

in Playboy magazine, of all places,

Bob Dylan, of all people, said,

“A poem is a naked person.

Some people say that I’m a poet.”

I haven’t called anything I’ve written a poem ever since.

                      Poetry or Not in the Sun

In 1965

some people who received too much money

for doing that sort of thing

designated me a Promising Young Poet.

In 1966

I was at a poetry reading

with some relatively well-known poets

at a better-known resort –

out of season, of course –

part of what one of the published elite present

called a “creative writing hoo-raw,”

and somebody was droning on with some self-indulgent versifying

that I couldn’t bring myself even to try to follow.

It bored me shitless,

as had most of what I’d heard that evening,

and I surmised that my little verses

probably bored everyone else there shitless, too,

only nobody’d admit to any of that crap

because it’d blow their scam wide open.

I started writing verses again

in 2008,

motivated mostly by social factors.

In February 2010

I went to a midday poetry reading

out in the sun.

Being in the midday sun

is something I’ve never been able to tolerate,

and somebody who’d won poetry competitions,

and didn’t seem to have the decency

to be ashamed by having been involved

in something as disgusting as that,

in a voice full of preciousness

droned out clumps of words –

they weren’t poetry to my soul –

that were full of soporific pretence.

It put me back to 66 and I left straight away.

I didn’t need my head in a space like that again,

especially out in the midday sun.

                       Counting The Time

She’d been hanging with my friend Phil,

but when I was leaving Aspen

she flagged a ride at the last minute

in the VW bus I was taking to Denver Airport.

She took the seat next to mine on the flight to Chicago

and snuggled in close all the way.

While we were waiting for our connecting flights –

hers to Indiana, mine to DC –

we spent a few hours together

in a room at an airport motel

before parting.

A week or two later Phil forwarded me a letter

that she had been writing, but had left unfinished

in her rush to catch the minibus,

in which she was telling a friend

that she had found her reason for going to Aspen,

and that reason was,

‘a bearded Jewish poet from Washington, DC.’

Another day or two later I received a letter from her directly,

replying to my suggestion that we meet again

with the observation that experiences

such as the one we’d shared

were, ‘like counting the time.

Once you’ve said what time it is

that time is past.’

I think she’d be pleased to know

that I’ve forgotten her name.

   Two Differences

Two differences exist

between the verses

I wrote in the 1960s

and the ones I write now.

The ones I write now

are better,

and the ones that

I wrote in the 60s

got me laid.

                             Poetry Idol

A few years ago – I forget how many,

having neither logged it into some nonexistent diary

or encoded the date into long-term memory –

some arts-biz entrepreneurs here in Hamilton

produced an event they called ‘Poetry Idol’,

a competition to judge which of its entrants

could produce and perform a single poem,

or at least a poem-like agglomeration of words,

that their judges liked more than the others.

The first prize was five hundred dollars.

The organisers had obviously filled out some forms

and thereby obtained some Funding.

I can’t think of any aspect of my life as I live it

in which the word ‘funding’ wouldn’t seem as out of place

as a Hasidic Jew at a Pentecostal tent-revival meeting.

Some of my acquaintances, including some of the organisers,

urged me to enter, assuring me that my shit was clearly hotter

than the shit of anybody else who was likely to enter.

I was also fairly well acquainted with one or two of the judges,

who had seemed to enjoy said shit of mine at previous performances.

And I sure as shit could’ve used the five hundred bucks.

It would also, they encouraged me, be a whole lot of fun.

But it struck me that if I entered it wouldn’t be fun for me,

because I’d want to win.

I’d want those five hundred fuckin’ pingas.

So the stress of not knowing what the caprice of those judges

would lead them to judge on the evening

would’ve been disastrous for my nervous system.

I would’ve hated losing.

I would’ve hated having to wear the stigma of Loser inside myself forever.

It then occurred to me that, in truth,

the only thing worse than losing would be winning,

and turning the others involved into Losers,

something I imagined they would’ve hated as well.

All that hate, no love in sight, and not a mention of art.

I stayed home,

and have never regretted it.

        Verse, Prose, & Poetry

After some pale attempts

when he’d been at uni,

Raymond Chandler

wrote no more verse,

breaking his words up

into lines,

like this,

yet every novel

he ever published

was pure poetry

to me.