When poets focus their gaze on
the plight of the poor, benighted poet,
mired in the madding era of mass media,
then, poets ingratiate themselves
To kings, dukes, deans, doges, czars,
popes, imams, emirs, satraps, muftis,
oligarchs, mob bosses, ward healers,
sheriffs, brown nosers, et alia,
And thus abdicate the ancient office
of poet, realm of the next Homer –
self-refreshing heralds of generations.
Dave Read
Neither Caesar, nor the Pope, nor the King,
nor Congress (and its librarian), has title
To one of Whitman’s trampled blades,
To a leaf of Dickinson’s silent sheaf,
To a pile of Frost’s war-worn grass,
To one hectare of Stevens’s measured lawn,
To a slip of Williams’s Queen Anne’s lace…
In the new world, free poets make it new.
Here and now, our tongue’s dead, in their old world tombs,
have our fond remembrance, not our obeisance.
Dave Read
No dressing-down would
Wordsworth bequeath his heir,
Who, unsubtlely, put on the
dead man’s gown, then took
A knee, ‘fore the Queen, who prizes
such submission – it’s good for the show.
Dave Read
This sounds new,
but it’s old –
Poetry ain’t art,
which is beauty;
Poetry is truth,
beautifully told.
Dave Read
Truth & beauty only
exist in your head.
Poetry is truth that
is beautifully said.
Dave Read
of the end, after civilization began to conserve herself,
rather than risk all they had plundered and blundered onto,
the word began to offend his self Irish mouths –
disfigured by cabbage stuffed in by queens, kings, and dons,
began to bloviate and decline to say grace, having grown
troublesome and opinionated as peasants, while lords offshore,
on rock east of Ireland, e’re split like a side of beef at a beggar’s banquet,
busy themselves, rehearsing revivals of The Charge of the Light Brigade.
Dave Read
With lariats of laurels, tyranny
herds the clever and curious into
corrals of mirrors, shielded there
from what awaits the unclever, uncurious
outsiders left to bang on windows.
Dave Read
All schoolhouse poets, and their tutors,
toot with brand name flutes –
While in the wild, and alone,
the poet plays nature’s trombone.
Dave Read
Genius is both sought and found –
This blindman, who teetered near
and far from truth, builds castles
from sounds on solid grounds.
Each of us, thank god, can sneeze –
but the genius of the haiku is in
Occidental rarities: the Zen monk
Discipline and devotion practiced
by its inventors, the Japanese.
Dave Read
For those, a thing heaven sent –
for these, a hell, their homes.
Those love sights, love scents –
these feel unwell, and profess poems.
Dave Read
As the impressment of American sailors dropped
the British another rung down the ladder of states,
all the way down to Pirate’s Cove,
The impressment of poetry* shall dunk the
American academy lower still – it’ll
be deep-sixed, by Jove.
Dave Read
*Since the 1970 expose´ of the Famous Writer’s School, more than 800 “creative writing” programs have sprung up on American college campuses.
for Anne Waldman*
v.1
on the edge of nature
the haughty docent
said to me
here the pretty
flowers are and there
the poetry
v.erotic
on the edge of nature
the naughty docent
beckoned me
there the pretty
flowers are and here
the poetry
occidental version
the poet who dissembles
all day long to earn his pay
will have his say
if he assembles
honest verse along the way
oriental edition
the poet’s lot is
to limn what it has amused
the gods to encrypt
Metro Edition
Some poems reflect everybody
seen in the Metro by Ezra Pound,
while others recall faces I know,
whose voices make a beautiful sound.
version vice versa
If it is the poet’s bane to like all the interesting stuff,
then her boon is to love only what is perfect.
The poet’s bane is to love only what is perfect,
but his boon is to like all the interesting stuff.
v.epigram
consider any bag of thoughts,
some passel of inklings,
or worry of oughts:
string them together,
the least on top, laced so tight
that the other ones pop!
in re:form
The function of form in a poem
is to devise a scheme so that
you can conceal
the clue to your notion of hiding
an antonym to the rhyme
you mean to reveal.
v.homeric
Turned inward like a bad toenail is the mind’s eyeball,
an unblinking cyclops ready to light me up –
like a bored cop at the intersection of reflect and write.
scholastic ed.
Poetry is Miss Zeitgeist
rapping on your knucklehead.
v.paean
Passing by the MacLeish homestead,
a poet espied the globed fruits and sighed
I’m just off the sweets, alas.
– Dave Read
* I got the idea to string these together from the reply Anne Waldman gave, at a workshop in 2018, to my question about the proliferation of poems that respond to temporal political outrages. Some verses are forty years older than others!
The machine delivered
Seamus Heaney’s poem May,
wherein I found ‘fontanel,’ a treat,
if I’d been foraging morels.
But, I’d asked for Iron Spike,
wherein he visits Eagle Pond,
home of Don Hall and Jane Kenyon,
poets he had a soft spot for.
– Dave Read
In his last book, A Carnival of Losses, Don tells of the time in 1979 when Seamus Heaney, his wife and children, came to Eagle Pond Farm to visit Don and Jane Kenyon. Heaney found “…a railway spike, which he took home to Dublin and kept in his study. When I was recovering from a cancer, Seamus sent me a broadside of his poem, The Spike. It hangs by my bed, inscribed inside an orange wooden frame.”
Words are not symbols, words are not signs toward hither and yon.
We don’t draw blocks from the box of words to assemble abstractions in the Coney Island of the Mind.
Words are swords that apportion the slices of a life.
Dave Read
Bleak of February only a matter of taste
like any other trope, marketing taste requires
models. Common citizens are able to mimic
modeled behavior but not to modify models.
Models who manifest bad imitations of good behavior
see the excision of a swath of fashionable fabric, strike
that – rather, fabric made to look and feel fabulous/fashionable
By failed poets, now movers & shakers, w/ interns upturned downtown.
– Dave Read
No, no, no
they do not
do arson, this
Torch is the British
one we Americans
know as Flashlight,
But, who would
open a poem called
Poets Flashlight?
Poets who tell themselves,
their department heads, fellowship-
winnowers, publishers, tutors, mentees,
and the like, that they are in the Art Business,
Are audience for this memo slash
manifesto, which implores
them to first consume what’s beautiful,
then, set it alight.
Dave Read
Decouple the orange syringe
to witness the deconstruction
of the mind’s wet bar:
Poets wince in syncopation,
fishermen hold flowers,
girls on skates take orders,
gulls scour sand dollars.
Dave Read
salonista of the housatonic
whose pictures and words
conspire to cheer us,
cajole us into carrying on –
she is enabler to all us
babblers and warblers;
prancers and dancers;
polemicists, and
self-actualized artistes
of every stripe and us also
just crafty enough
to steep in the fellowship
of saying hello
i’m here, too.
Dave Read
Feb. 13, 2021 – I saw Deb Koffman’s obit in the paper today, something she wrote, rather. Her InWords OutWords monthly ad hoc variety show – it was no normal open mic, anyway, is where I came out of poetry self-exile in the waning days of the last Bush administration. Deb is forever in my gratitude for the role she unwittingly played in my unspooling into poethood.
Back then, each month someone was given a twenty minute feature spot. I got mine (there is only one/per) the night of President Obama’s election. I’m pretty sure it was a decade too early, but at least, I’ll remember the year! I said “here’s to deb” the next month, and today I say it again, with meaning and tears. Thanks Deb.
When finger snaps,
hand claps,
clapped erasers –
When the press release,
the product tease,
the String Cheese Incident –
When New York Times
three equals two:
you and me
Need poetry.
Dave Read