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Fakir’s Dozen Ways of Looking at Stuff

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!

Filed Under: Inside baseball

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