POETICKS

Among the Poem Poems not yet in a chap book that I am withholding from my upcoming chapbook are the following three:

.

.

.    The Age of Vendler
.
.    Sometimes,
.    frustrated by a bouldering
.    of some sky he was trying to daisle
.    a fresh pulse through,
.    Poem envied the traipses

.     of never fully-specified ladymoods
.     that monopoliszed the highest praise
.     of the tenured
.     and regretted the balls
.     that kept him mythodically direct,
.     technically venturesome.
.     and socio-economically marginal–
.     even as he knew
.     in his heart of hearts
.     how trivial the appreciation of the academy was
.      compared to where he went,. however ineptly.
.
.
.     On the Importance of Getting Published
.
.     To ask if you should write poetry
.     even if you cannot get published
.     struck Poem at first like asking
.     if you should get laid
.     even if you cannot get it
.     on tv.
.
.     Then he saw that poetry
.     as donation sans recipient
.     is hardly comparable to two-party sex.
.
.     But so what? Pumping jizz
.     into one’s own kleenex
.     is still better than no sex at all,
.     or getting published
.     even if you can’t write poetry.
.
.
.              Poem’s Trudge
.
.                     Pouhm trud
.                     ged through yet another of his att
.                                        empts to regrammar something into p
.                oetry, in this case a phoneline 3 or 4
.                             sprows had haikued above h
.     im & the splanch of worn twilight behind it,
.                     getting nothing but the standard pre-cerebral
.                                              sprout of “meaningfulness’ all
.                                                   the fash
.                                   ionable poets of the time
.                            were getting big money in grants for, the disgstd
.          down yet lower when his ineffectuousness
.                itself sprang an epipha
.                                                             ny.
.

I’m keeping them out of the collection because they are about Poem as a poet, which I consider confusing.  If I get enough of them, I published them in a collection called, Poem as a Poet.    I may have five or six of them.  I t doesn’t looke like I’ll ever have the twelve or more I’d want for a collection.

.              When Poem’s Cat Died
.
.              Poem,  generally too good-natured
.              ever to think of accusing God
.              of existing,
.              snapped when his cat died,
.              wondering how many points God
.              had given Himself for letting that happen–
.              just one or two, because
.              she was, after all, only a cat?  Or
.              a full ten, because she was Poem’s cat?”
.

From #731 the introductory poem to my series of Poem poems:

.             His Origin

.             He was just fragmentary echoings
.             of Stevens, Roethke, Hughes
.             some misslept vagrant thought one day set racketing
.             through Crazy Jane’s untrellised ardors,
.             shedding feathers and farting
.             as he faltered into words princed
.             eventually, with occasional fingers,
.             genitals, and voice struggling always
.             to light up
.             with silence.

The following is a revision I did over the past two days of a poem from  entry 741 that for some reason got mixed in with the earlier blog entries I’ve been revisiting:

Poem Ventures North-South

One morning, Poem set out for the north-south.
Never having gone precisely there before, he hoped
the change would shake him out
of the null zone he’d been too long in.
The sun was halfway to noon,
when he rippled into a locked gate,
“Prose Poem,” engraved on it.

Straight through the gate, Poem strode, that element of him that
was fictional not for the first time being of advantage. A few dazed
steps later he realized he’d come to a corner of his final telephone
call to his father–the one Poochie, the little rubber dog his father
had given him one birthday, daily merged more completely with.

From the Shell station across the street, now long-abandoned, rose
some aria from La Boheme. Many slow clotheslines later in China the aria sank in a suburban Chinatown alley’s moonlit Drunkenness.
Poem would surely have left at that point had one of the gas pumps
not unworried a carton of Camels (his father’s brand) into something resembling cherry-blossoms. From them, the aria from La Boheme re-emerged. The shadow it cast resembled Roman legions–from when
Rome was still a republic.

Is it any good? Who knows?