Analyze This: reading Alan Dugan on the train to NY puts me in mind of 
Robert Creeley and an incident I've probably described.

Any action is better than just SITTING THERE.

K

GODDESS.  GOD.  GROUNDLING.

Joann, part of graduate English
1969        a new MA student fresh
from Buffalo        like a pack of Lucky Strikes
so round so firm so fully packed, and I
lately married (and I could not see my mistake)
wanted her for her ingenuousness
not to forget a body like a Varga model

but this is really not about her gift
for inspiring a birthday hard-on in today's old fart
who once was 25 and forever randy

it really may be "about" discontent
         and the presence of Robert Creeley
yes THE Creeley--who we of the
English Graduate Organization (oh God,
it really did spell out as EGO)
paid to come to read for us

bought his plane ticket on Mohawk
bought him dinner

and Creeley was poured off the plane in Binghamton
    no longer in the bag
            he'd by then broken it

escorted to a Steak & Brew or some such
faux Elizabethan tavern in a mall
where he kissed the waiter's hand because
the kid said he recognized him
and Creeley was overcome

(Lordy, how poets crave recognition
even from undergraduates!
One of my kids' friends went to Glassboro State
and even though he didn't read poetry he was
knocked out to have Stephen Dunn
among the luminaries on campus)

There for the reading with my mystified wife(!)
and to attend the reception afterwards

No clue what the hell Creeley read
whether he was drunk or I was but
I didn't have a clue
what his life's work was about
not a clue

and at the reception these artificial threads conjoined
Creeley met Joann or met her again
conjoined threads like shatnez in a clothing store

no      not screwing on the couch in the lounge

Joann was in one of Creeley's classes
at Buffalo the year before
so he asked her how she liked MA work
without saying to her "I know this department,
it is like a police station
it's full of dicks."

She said she hated it

probably because the grad program unlike Buffalo's
was a late starter and felt it had something to prove
so it was staffed with Traditionalists
who could have bored the bark off a tree

Charles Olson would have been sniggered over
in the coffee room by Old English specialists

and Creeley after a few more vodka and tonics
and maybe his own lust for his former student
said way too loudly

WHY DON'T YOU JUST QUIT FOR A SEMESTER
AND SPEND YOUR TIME FUCKING?

Joann's reaction (maybe we assume "shocked reaction")
remains unrecorded

unless she knew this was Creeley so
she knew what to expect

and the poet himself might have been shocked
if she'd taken him up on it
and started by following him back to his motel

except he wasn't at a motel, he was at
a faculty member's house

or maybe not
who can say
celebrity gossip is dirt
so is this writing

poets would make lousy contestants
on American Idol
who wants Simon Cowell
to be a LitCrit anyway?

KTW/b. 2-23-44

-- 
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Kenneth Wolman			bestiaire.typepad.com
    Abuse of power comes as no surprise--Jenny Holzer