10 January 2010
One Poem poem I found while hunting for poems to add to my upcoming book that isn’t great but certainly expresses my opinion of those who believe poetry should be a servant of politics:
. Protest Poetry
.
. Poem was angry.
. He had just read
. yet another puritan’s denunciation
. of poets who declined to write protest poems
. about contemporary social ills, war, etc.
. To demand that a poet write such things
. made no more sense to him
. than to demand that a cook
. bake protest pies,
. or a shoemaker
. cobble protest
. boots.
.
. Let neurotic seekers of victims
. to pass their self-pity off
. as compassion for,
. in high and correct-
. in-all-the-best-circles profile
. take care of the protesting.
. All the social woe in the world
. was but a comma compared with
. that final enormous text
. it was the poet’s duty
. to add his yes to,
. however frailly.
.
. Or so Poem claimed
. in the protest poem
. he immediately wrote
.
A much different poem I found in my hunt was this:
I’d come across a poem or poems by Ezra using the horizontally-split word technique and at once wanted to try it myself. I don’t find the result satisfactory–but it has potential, I think.