Poetry on the Other Hand

    On Poetry  and Prose

Don’t like poetry if you want, not that it’s a matter
of choice.  Hate it.  Why  can’t they just say what
they mean?’ Direct.  Straight.  It’s ok to dislike it.
Many do.  I, for one, don’t care for frogs legs and
I’ve never had them.

Or modern art.
My dog could paint bettern a lot of  that stuff.
Why don’t they paint what it looks like?
Who do they think they are?   

            Of  Modern Poetry

The poem of the mind in the act of finding
What will suffice. It has not always had
To find: the scene was set;  it repeated what
Was in the script. Then the theatre was changed
To something else. Its past was a souvenir. . .

It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman  dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.

Wallace Stevens: the men who put a jar on the
mountain in Tennessee and made a poem out
of it —or rather: made a poem out of the idea
of  putting a jar on a mountain in Tennessee
and I doubt he ever actually did it.  Does it
matter?                 

Some see poetry jumping off prose, glamorizing:
a tuxedo higher-order refined, squeezed essence
like blood diamonds out of coal: concentrated
alchemical trans-formations of mundane to
profound—exquisite.  Constellational

     Simultaneous.  All at once.

But  prose is poetry’s prosaic reduction falling
down to beginnings middles and endings,
sequence & consequence, thesis-driven Flat-
lander versions of the sphere, waking-life
collapse of dream:  here-let-me-spell-IT-out-
for-you-once- upon-a-time-and-again-for-
the-time- being:  imagination slumming,  on
the skids so as to make a dollop of common sense
—a shellacking.