Standing in the rain, a cigarette freshly lit,
My hand serving as an awning for its burning ember,
Funnelling smoke up the sleeve of my windbreaker,
I wondered why certain poets need schooling.
It made me wonder how many poets spent their lives
In professorships, lecturing to bored students.
How many needed to fund their art with academia?
Is there a correlation between ignorance and poetry?
Paul, who knows Coleridge as well as he knows me,
Says that poets wrote in the daylight (like me)
Because they were useless bums without jobs...
Or they had just about any old job at all.
That all seems very natural to me.
Writing verse between writing database queries
Wouldn’t seem so different to
William Carlos Williams’ appointments with patients.
What about the poets that all went to school
And presumably found themselves in the
POETRY MACHINE? That institution
Which churns irregular line breaks and indentation;
Repetition for repetition’s sake, ‘cause it sounds folksy;
It’s gotta sound like nonsense too, because
If you want a conversation, listen to a Blueprint album.
The poets in the fine art college
Strike me as Allen Ginsbergian
Cool kids, all trussed up in generational
Lies and unkempt beards.
I don’t know many poets myself,
But the ones I do happen to know
Are an unrepentantly uneducated bunch.
They didn’t take poetry courses.
T.S. Eliot’s brand new to them,
And exceedingly depressing to boot.
“Don’t you want to hear about love?”
“Not particularly, no.”
Yeats’ mysticism is impenetrable,
But they know the Irishman’s name
From that Smiths’ song their girlfriend likes.
“If you must write prose and poems
The words you use should be your own…”
The mention of Cavafy’s name
Is the start of a call and response
To get the pronunciation correct.
“You'll always end up in this city. Don't hope for things elsewhere:
there's no ship for you, there's no road...”
It’s a strange tail-eating snake that feeds in poetic circles:
Educated poets can’t be authentic, so they strive to be original
Uneducated poets can’t be original, so they strive to be authentic.
It’s mysteriously symbiotic and vaguely, disturbingly capitalistic.
The proletariat and the bourgeoisie stroll down the lane,
Hand in hand they sing the same melody, in harmony,
The one on the left sings nonsense syllables
While the other tries to make some sense of the world.
