Monthly Archives: December 2018

Poetic Choices

I’ve heard about historicizing and thematicizing.
From the best.
So they say.
Let’s be honest, poet to poet,
What is left to poemize?
Fear, hope, love, scorn, sorrow?
Your brilliance; her wit; my despair?
Where is joy? Or the next Eliot?
Weighty questions; but who would care?
Or are we more inclined to lyricize and adorn: rhythms, rhymes, ornate stanzas?
Literary symphonies of noiseless sounds.
Let’s bring German idealism to our dance,
Where shy metaphor mingles with a primal archetype.
A perfect couple. The critics and computers agree.
Let’s sprinkle cute couplets with anaphora.
Here and there. A bit more there.
A delicate spice for poetic cuisine.
Critics and poets agree:
Let’s follow social science into abstruser fare,
That holds promise, shall we dare?

Gestation of a Poem

My poem (posted above), titled "What has Changed? In Memory of W.H. Auden," first took form on my walk to work and, by the time I arrived at work, read, in its entirety, as follows:

"A poet’s affirming flame,
Burns brightest when left alone,
But all flames flicker as the sun descends,
Until the next poet’s sun rekindles the flame again."

Setting aside the reality that a poem is never finished insofar as the poet retains a perpetual tinkerer's license, the final poem (once again, posted above) seems to me to retain the essence of the above sketch.