I'm a poet
And my feet know it.
They’re longfellas.
This sophomoric ditty illustrates the dilemma of a poetic practice which cuts itself off from rhyme and meter – two qualities of the English language for which I have some facility. Anybody who writes in rhyme either condemns him- or herself to Hallmark card banality or does so with an ironic wink.
Let me present, as exhibit A, a bagatelle I tossed off for a friend who aspired to monogamy.
I can’t always say yes, but I never say no
I can’t always go fast, but I never go slow
My relationships last, and they’re always true love
I’m not always on top, but I’m always above
You say that you only want love for the night
You say that you’re into just keeping it light
Well for me, babe, Lite’s beer, not a human response
But I think that you’re hot, so I’ll do it – just once
See what I mean? Low risk, low reward.
Poetry – serious poetry – is considered to be the highest form of literary art. Although it continues to be produced and published, it is sustained (like opera) by a small coterie of enthusiasts, usually academics and other poets. I never considered myself a Poet, but there were swells of emotion that occasionally extruded themselves as attempts at serious poetry. The best I can say of the results is that they missed being embarrassing – but not by much.
When I was an English major in college and (like all English majors) an aspiring writer, my premature encounter with modernist poetry (what 19-year-old can understand Eliot’s “Wasteland”?) conditioned me to accept that I was not going to enjoy or understand the vast majority of contemporary poetry that came my way. If I couldn’t read it, I certainly couldn’t write it. I kicked against this unjust state of literary affairs with the following masterpiece.
This is a
poem because I say it is
Look at the typography
Does it not scream
ART?
I need no rhyme or scansion
I need only me to transform urinals to fountains
Benefit from my exquisite corps sensibility
Hear through me the Mallarmean music of the spheres
Marvel at how lightly I wear my erudition
(Critics may give me my due, champion my subtle puns, my
modernist armor, my post-m irreverence, and
dada field of dreams . . .)
No audience need validate my pose
But you may read and thus enlarge your soul
(Bonus points: What is the name of the famous artist hidden in the text?)
Thus I condemned modernist poetry and its arrogant progeny as elitist irrelevance.
Ah, but Erato, the muse of erotic and lyric poetry, would not leave me in peace! During the aughts, when online dating took off, I read hundreds of profiles that gay men put online. Many of them were funny, sad, cynical, deluded, or revealing in ways their authors didn’t intend. How easy it would be, I thought, to turn these self-portraits into poems! And so my one book of (self-published) poems was born, “Very Good-Looking Seeks Same.”
Damn it! I was writing poetry–and enjoying it! But it was another version of Poetry Lite, so I could take pleasure in it. Low risk, low reward. Since I was writing free verse, I had to seriously confront issues of spacing, what to place within a stanza, where to break the line. But I now understood the freedom of free verse. Also, none of these poems were confessional. They were persona poems, and I enjoyed putting on the various masks. One example:
Water Baby
I like snowboarding
Jet skiing, paintball, motocross
Ricky Carmichael!
My build is athletic
I’m definitely a partier
As a paramedic
I get off on the adrenaline rush
You must be possessed of the following three nonnegotiable items
a job
a car
a place to stay besides your parents’ house
Do not talk to me if you are a shallow judgmental person
who evaluates people based on
color
race
drug usage
or anything else
People do things for reasons
I may or may not agree with
I do not judge them
My dad, who introduced me to water and bikes,
judged me
so I had to get
a job
a car
a place to stay
at 17
Conforming to the endless self-promotion encouraged – no, demanded! – by our capitalist society, I must inform you that you can purchase your very own copy of “Very Good-Looking Seeks Same” on your favorite discounted book website. You can also hear a dramatic reading of selected poems slyly inserted into the myth of Narcissus as the Shoga Treat, “The Modern Narcissists.”
– Robert Philipson
Read about the professorial foray that prompted this autobiographical essay, The Tortured Antisemitism of Amiri Baraka
SHOGA FILMS is a non-profit production and education company. Please consider making a donation to help fund our efforts
Comments