Mediocre or modest talent? It's a torment to be good enough to realise that
we're not amongst the greats, if we're not, that is!!! Remember Amadeus and
whatsisname? I like your poem, it may navel-gaze but it's not Maudling!! Not
quite sure if I know what you mean by the butchered boar etc but it may come
to me later, after I've been to sleep....
Trish. Oh! Here's an old poem about how to feel good about one's own
poems...
Posthumously
A feeling
Of whisky and ginger
Has made me believe in you.
This way
It may be less real - but fantastic!
Assure me
Of adulation
When the time comes.
How long,
I insist,
Does not matter -
If the praise runs!
----- Original Message -----
From: "Gary Blankenship" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, April 01, 2003 8:12 PM
Subject: Almost Full Disclosure
Almost Full Disclosure
The better class of poets,
those whose lives and works
are memorialized in The Lives of Poets,
write poems celebrating
(though perhaps not Plath and Ashbery)
what they've discovered
and how they got there
in the most humble
and self-depreciating fashion.
Lesser poets (and I do not mean Thomas or Roethke)
will rail about their fathers,
how unfairly loves have treated them,
addictions,
the frailness of their muse (read talent),
their browser provider and indoor plumbing
until we tired of their blather,
ego-ridden whiners all.
I have done nothing
you will find worth commemoration,
and do not find my life
has been particularly unfair
(I suspect my muse of disloyalty,
but have no proof).
enough to hold your interest
past a few short stanzas
on a page with narrow margins.
An emperor with common, unwashed threads,
a scribbler with a dry and dusty quill,
a stump farmer's child
who piles words into artifices
as disorganized as a pile-up on a three-lane highway?
You decide.
I can not and am left with a poem
that does nothing except extend one line or
two too many past the page,
nothing disclosed except stale baroque
(as the butchered boar winks its one blooded eye).
IF MY MAIL BOUNCES, MAIL [log in to unmask] AS AN ALTERNATIVE.....March
Margaret Hodge and Gary poems for kids at:
http://gardawg.homestead.com/gardawg.html --- Writer's Hood at
http://www.writershood.com/..... Poets for Peace.... ˇPoemas sí, balas no!
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