If you think yourself to be a poet, show
me now the singer is the song,
so tired you seem of scratching out
the slow decay that, jaded, limps along
in junk strews and the cliched motel rooms,
the violent sex that neither vivifies nor centers,
nor celebrates hung-over blind-drawn glooms.
Another ancient Byronic shade ventures
from catwalk to fast car. These tire treads slew
wounds in the yellow book of Colorado sands
where Geiger lizard blinks digital - nothing new -
and all your reachings are for absent hands.
The poetry of life-style was your first forte.
Walt Whitman began that roaming trail
of eidolons called reality. Emily Dickinson caught a
horror in a living room - imagination's bitter grail.
William Carlos Williams pronounced the patient fit,
confirmed her free from meter and from rhyme,
almost single-handedly defined the grain; and yet
knew America founded on violent crime.
Gary Snyder plunged in streams to purify
his mind from the Moloch God plagues the most of you,
came nose to nose with hippy shaker trout,
enthralled in some Zen review.
Sylvia Plath shocked with ecstatic imagery -
through graves of pages branded us like steers,
scraped her keel on our landings savagely,
existential passion astounded to tears.
Yes, the beat poets. But the later motel
and racetrack bunch can go to (go to) their hell.
Like conceptual art, its all been done - ah well,
life-style hard-banged on downward spiral.
Nothing more to say, and that's the nub;
you need to sing in minimum, in minims
semi-breve the air, trace the nothing, the snub
the slump that conjures inner rhythms -
that anything to say becomes a line.
Listen to the idling engine marking time
going nowhere - that's jest fine -
ego simply reiterating, I'm, I'm, I'm;
then come out fighting.
...............
Anglo- American - branching from English Lit. Walt Whitman notably abandoning rhyme and meter at the same time as it was, arguably, hobbling Wordsworth.
It occurs that I haven't fitted in ee cummings. That's not because I think him too small but too big and transcending any tradition as James Joyce did from the Celtic. And T.S Eliot I am classing as English in tradition.
I am sure there is much in the contemporary that I have simply swept aside with inexcusable arrogance and ignorance.
Anyway I am not such a great or good scholar - but I wanted to have a go in the style of Yeats, selecting his own emphasis unapologetically as he does in these type of review poems.
