To Certain Poets
---Joyce Kilmer

Now is the rhymer's honest trade
A thing for scornful laughter made.

The merchant's sneer, the clerk's disdain,
These are the burden of our pain.

Because of you did this befall,
You brought this shame upon us all.

You little poets mincing there
With women's hearts and women's hair!

How sick Dan Chaucer's ghost must be
To hear you lisp of "Poesie"!

A heavy-handed blow, I think,
Would make your veins drip scented ink.

You strut and smirk your little while
So mildly, delicately vile!

Your tiny voices mock God's wrath,
You snails that crawl along His path!

Why, what has God or man to do
With wet, amorphous things like you?

This thing alone you have achieved:
Because of you, it is believed

That all who earn their bread by rhyme
Are like yourselves, exuding slime.

Oh, cease to write, for very shame,
Ere all men spit upon our name!

Take up your needles, drop your pen,
And leave the poet's craft to men!

Les

To The Whore Who Took My Poems
---Charles Bukowski

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be mony and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

Les

Sonnet 79: Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid
---William Shakespeare

Whilst I alone did call upon thy aid,
My verse alone had all thy gentle grace,
But now my gracious numbers are decayed,
And my sick Muse doth give an other place.
I grant, sweet love, thy lovely argument
Deserves the travail of a worthier pen,
Yet what of thee thy poet doth invent
He robs thee of, and pays it thee again.
He lends thee virtue, and he stole that word
From thy behaviour; beauty doth he give,
And found it in thy cheek; he can afford
No praise to thee, but what in thee doth live.
Then thank him not for that which he doth say,
Since what he owes thee, thou thyself dost pay.


Les

Dead Men's Love
---Rupert Brooke


There was a damned successful Poet;
There was a Woman like the Sun.
And they were dead. They did not know it.
They did not know their time was done.
They did not know his hymns
Were silence; and her limbs,
That had served Love so well,
Dust, and a filthy smell.

And so one day, as ever of old,
Hands out, they hurried, knee to knee;
On fire to cling and kiss and hold
And, in the other's eyes, to see
Each his own tiny face,
And in that long embrace
Feel lip and breast grow warm
To breast and lip and arm.

So knee to knee they sped again,
And laugh to laugh they ran, I'm told,
Across the streets of Hell . . .
And then
They suddenly felt the wind blow cold,
And knew, so closely pressed,
Chill air on lip and breast,
And, with a sick surprise,
The emptiness of eyes.


Les

My ‘raison d’être’ as a poet
---Frederick Kambemba Yamusangie

Let them say whatever they want to say about me
Let them do whatever the want to do to me
They are just wasting their time
I don’t care anymore
They are just trying to distract me
As a poet I know what are my 'raison d’être'

As a poet,
I have duties to carry out
As a poet,
I have responsibilities to fulfil
As a poet,
I have a destiny to reach

So let them play the negative part
Of the game
And I, as a poet, will always play the positive part of the game
Which is talking to the heart of the entire humanity
Especially to those who have taken the time
To open up their heart to poets such as myself

Les

A Supermarket in California

Allen Ginsberg

What thoughts I have of you tonight, Walt Whitman, for I walked
down the sidestreets under the trees with a headache self-conscious looking
at the full moon.
In my hungry fatigue, and shopping for images, I went into the neon
fruit supermarket, dreaming of your enumerations!
What peaches and what penumbras! Whole families shopping at
night! Aisles full of husbands! Wives in the avocados, babies in the tomatoes!
--and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?

I saw you, Walt Whitman, childless, lonely old grubber, poking
among the meats in the refrigerator and eyeing the grocery boys.
I heard you asking questions of each: Who killed the pork chops?
What price bananas? Are you my Angel?
I wandered in and out of the brilliant stacks of cans following you,
and followed in my imagination by the store detective.
We strode down the open corridors together in our solitary fancy
tasting artichokes, possessing every frozen delicacy, and never passing the
cashier.

Where are we going, Walt Whitman? The doors close in a hour.
Which way does your beard point tonight?
(I touch your book and dream of our odyssey in the supermarket and
feel absurd.)
Will we walk all night through solitary streets? The trees add shade
to shade, lights out in the houses, we'll both be lonely.
Will we stroll dreaming of the lost America of love past blue automo-
biles in driveways, home to our silent cottage?
Ah, dear father, graybeard, lonely old courage-teacher, what America
did you have when Charon quit poling his ferry and you got out on a
smoking bank and stood watching the boat disappear on the black waters of
Lethe?
--Berkeley, 1955


john

To Recite Or Write
--Allan James Saywell

Should the poet
Read to his audience
Should the poet carry his ego
Across a vast ocean
Who will hear him
Other poets with bigger egos
His children will look at him
With a certain distain
They would have to stay at home
While he enjoys american hospitality
I love america like a brother
I love america like a sister
To live in a world at peace
Should be every poet's dream
So we keep on composing our poetry

Les



Post Edited (01-19-05 00:31)

An Exhortation
---Percy Bysshe Shelley

Chameleons feed on light and air:
Poets' food is love and fame:
If in this wide world of care
Poets could but find the same
With as little toil as they,
Would they ever change their hue
As the light chameleons do,
Suiting it to every ray
Twenty times a day?

Poets are on this cold earth,
As chameleons might be,
Hidden from their early birth
In a cave beneath the sea;
Where light is, chameleons change:
Where love is not, poets do:
Fame is love disguised: if few
Find either, never think it strange
That poets range.

Yet dare not stain with wealth or power
A poet's free and heavenly mind:
If bright chameleons should devour
Any food but beams and wind,
They would grow as earthly soon
As their brother lizards are.
Children of a sunnier star,
Spirits from beyond the moon,
O, refuse the boon!

Les

If you liked the Ginsberg poem above, you may want to read Garcia Lorca's own poem about Whitman, posted at:

[www.artofeurope.com];

Good one Marian, though a little lengthy.

Here's another:

Old Poets
---Joyce Kilmer

(For Robert Cortez Holliday)

If I should live in a forest
And sleep underneath a tree,
No grove of impudent saplings
Would make a home for me.

I'd go where the old oaks gather,
Serene and good and strong,
And they would not sigh and tremble
And vex me with a song.

The pleasantest sort of poet
Is the poet who's old and wise,
With an old white beard and wrinkles
About his kind old eyes.

For these young flippertigibbets
A-rhyming their hours away
They won't be still like honest men
And listen to what you say.

The young poet screams forever
About his sex and his soul;
But the old man listens, and smokes his pipe,
And polishes its bowl.

There should be a club for poets
Who have come to seventy year.
They should sit in a great hall drinking
Red wine and golden beer.

They would shuffle in of an evening,
Each one to his cushioned seat,
And there would be mellow talking
And silence rich and sweet.

There is no peace to be taken
With poets who are young,
For they worry about the wars to be fought
And the songs that must be sung.

But the old man knows that he's in his chair
And that God's on His throne in the sky.
So he sits by the fire in comfort
And he lets the world spin by.

Les

Les-

That's some good stuff.
Seventy yr. old poets would have to be a small club.
They tend to burn out young (sex, drugs, rock-n-roll) or get themselves shot up in 'Great Wars', then turn all sour.
Didn't Joyce do that?


Jack

Sorry, Kilmer I mean.

Yeah, Kilmer was altruism, Joyce was the sex, drugs, and whatever.


Kilmer's 'The House with Nobody in it' was the first poem I ever memorized. I think I was eight or nine. Check it out. It's so sad.


Jack

Might have been the Johnny Cash effect- a guy named Joyce.

pam

'When 'Omer smote
'is bloomin' lyre...'

Introduction to the 'Barrack-Room Ballads'
in 'The Seven Seas'

When 'Omer smote 'is bloomin' lyre,
He'd 'eard men sing by land an' sea;
An' what he thought 'e might require,
'E went an' took - the same as me!

The market-girls an' fishermen,
The shepherds an' the sailors, too,
They 'eard old songs turn up again,
But kep' it quiet - same as you!

They knew 'e stole; 'e knew they knowed.
They didn't tell, nor make a fuss,
But winked at 'Omer down the road,
An' 'e winked back - the same as us!
-Rudyard Kipling

Facility

So easy 'tis to make a rhyme,
That did the world but know it,
Your coachman might Parnassus climb,
Your butler be a poet.

Then, oh, how charming it would be
If, when in haste hysteric
You called the page, you learned that he
Was grappling with a lyric.

Or else what rapture it would yield,
When cook sent up the salad,
To find within its depths concealed
A touching little ballad.

Or if for tea and toast you yearned,
What joy to find upon it
The chambermaid had coyly laid
A palpitating sonnet.

Your baker could the fashion set;
Your butcher might respond well;
With every tart a triolet,
With every chop a rondel.

Your tailor's bill . . . well, I'll be blowed!
Dear chap! I never knowed him . . .
He's gone and written me an ode,
Instead of what I owed him.

So easy 'tis to rhyme . . . yet stay!
Oh, terrible misgiving!
Please do not give the game away . . .
I've got to make my living.
--- Robert Service

What Kisses Had John Keats?

I scanned two lines with some surmise
As over Keats I chanced to pore:
'And there I shut her wild, wild eyes
With kisses four.'

Says I: 'Why was it only four,
Not five or six or seven?
I think I would have made it more,--
Even eleven.

'Gee! If she'd lured a guy like me
Into her gelid grot
I'd make that Belle Dame sans Merci
Sure kiss a lot.

'Them poets have their little tricks;
I think John counted kisses for,
Not two or three or five or six
To rhyme with "sore."'
--- Robert Service

My Masters

Of Poetry I've been accused,
But much more often I have not;
Oh, I have been so much amused
By those who've put me on the spot,
And measured me by rules above
Those I observe with equal love.

An artisan of verse am I,
Of simple sense and humble tone;
My Thesaurus is handy by,
A rhyming lexicon I own;
Without them I am ill at ease -
What bards would use such aids as these?

Bad poets make good verse, they say;
The Great have not distained to woo
The modest muse of every day;
Read Longfellow and Byron through,
The fabric test - much verse you'll see
Compared with what is poetry.

Small blame; one cannot always soar
To heights of hyaline sublime;
Melodious prose one must deplore,
And fetters of rebellious rhyme:
Keats, Browning - that's another tale,
But even Giants fail and fail.

I've worshipped Ryley, Harte and Field,
And though their minstrelsy I lack,
To them heart-homage here I yield,
And follow with my verseman's pack:
To them with gratitude I look,
For briefing me to make this book.
--- Robert Service

pam

I Am A Poet
---Dena Leichnitz-Amos

I am a poet
And not for what I write
But because of what I feel
And my unique insight.

I am a poet
And not for my words
But for my wisdom
And the lessons I learned.

I am a poet
But it never was a choice
My muse can't be silenced
For it has its own voice.

I am a poet
It is who I was born to be
And it resides so deep
That I shall never be free.

For as long as I live
There shall always be a part
That lives on the page
But comes from my heart.

I am a poet
And not for what I write
But because of what I feel
And my unique insight.

Les

Later life
---Christina Georgina Rossetti

Something this foggy day, a something which
Is neither of this fog nor of today,
Has set me dreaming of the winds that play
Past certain cliffs, along one certain beach,
And turn the topmost edge of waves to spray:
Ah pleasant pebbly strand so far away,
So out of reach while quite within my reach,
As out of reach as India or Cathay!
I am sick of where I am and where I am not,
I am sick of foresight and of memory,
I am sick of all I have and all I see,
I am sick of self, and there is nothing new;
Oh weary impatient patience of my lot!
Thus with myself: how fares it, friends, with you?

Les



Post Edited (01-20-05 01:45)

A TRUE POET!
---Nikhil Parekh

A true poet is the one; who indefatigably fantasizes
in the aisles of uninhibited freedom; without caring
even an inconspicuous trifle about the conventionally
tyrannical society,

A true poet is the one; who romanticizes art even in
the most languidly dreariest of stones; relentlessly
floating in the planet of harmonious melody,

A true poet is the one; who irrefutably trusts his pen
more than anything else on this Universe;
intransigently keeps embodying mystical verse;
irrespective of a barrage of criticisms; by the
incorrigibly cynical society,

A true poet is the one; who nurtures every alphabet
with his very own crimson blood; harnessing a
bountiful entrenchment of dreams; with every iota of
his ravishingly sensuous breath,

A true poet is the one; who frantically gropes in
versatile shades of majestic light as well as
ominously sinister darkness; to evolve the most
fantastically blossoming tomorrow,

A true poet is the one; who philanders with gay
abandon even in the most incomprehensibly unassailable
of situations; stretching the realms of his fathomless
mind; to blend with the sparkling; as well as the
esoterically bizarre,

A true poet is the one; who mesmerizes countless with
the compassionately poignant cadence in his spell
binding voice; as he divulges voluptuous rhyme from
the bottom of his soul; and with maximum impact,

A true poet is the one; who has the astronomically
intrepid tenacity to confront the most acerbically
treacherous of times; dance rhapsodically under pearly
beams of moonshine; even as the lecherously corrupt
society spat gallons of penniless saliva at his;
miserably sagging countenance,

A true poet is the one; who ardently caresses all that
is beautiful; with an insatiable fire to endlessly
discover resplendent newness; as each second rampantly
unfurled into a wholesome minute,

A true poet is the one; who timelessly wanders in
lanes of exotically tantalizing enchantment; groping
for the ultimate seductress of blooming jubilation,

A true poet is the one; who is not bonded by any
caste; creed; religion or society; ubiquitously
spawning a civilization of perennially endless
excitement; with the unprecedented artistry in his
magically exquisite words,

A true poet is the one; who is an unsurpassable idol
of piquant sensitivity; yet not being the slightest
perturbed by hideous tongues; ignominiously condemning
and rebuking; his divinely art,

A true poet is the one; who wakes and sleeps at the
moments of his choice; at times dreaming in realms of
unconquerable yearning for countless hours on the
trot; even as the turgidly pragmatic society lambasted
him with lethally venomous swords of diabolical
manipulation,

A true poet is the one; who immutably gyrates in the
corridors of unfathomable belonging; embracing and
philanthropically assimilating all heavenly goodness;
lingering profusely on this ebulliently euphoric
planet,

A true poet is the one; who enshrouds every vein of
his mind and body alike; in a whirlpool of fabulously
inscrutable enigma and kaleidoscopic grace,

A true poet is the one; who sights the luminescently
embellished canvas of this Universe; in its ultimate
epitome; of unparalleled splendor and vivacity,

A true poet is the one; who audaciously dares to
venture into uncharted territories where no organism
has ever been; despite Herculean vindication by the
tumultuously ostracizing society,

A true poet is the one; who sacrifices fathomless
births of his; to beautifully evolve his art; more
importantly to royally bless every ecstatic wind; of a
vibrantly brilliant tomorrow,

A true poet is the one; who incessantly loves his
beloved more than anybody else on this world could
ever conceive; immortalizing the spirit of his eternal
romance; in every line of his; graciously benign
poetry,

Over and above all; a true poet is the one; who solely
listens to his invincibly throbbing heart and nothing
else; perpetually bonding with symbiotic spirit of
synergistic existence; metamorphosing every
unfinished desire of the benevolent soul; into a
charismatically endowing paradise….


©COPYRIGHT-2003, BY NIKHIL PAREKH. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Les

>Take up your needles, drop your pen,
And leave the poet's craft to men!

Poetry or theatre. Same story.

Populist Manifesto No. 1
---Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Poets, come out of your closets,
Open your windows, open your doors,
You have been holed-up too long
in your closed worlds.
Come down, come down
from your Russian Hills and Telegraph Hills,
your Beacon Hills and your Chapel Hills,
your Mount Analogues and Montparnasses,
down from your foothills and mountains,
out of your teepees and domes.
The trees are still falling
and we’ll to the woods no more.
No time now for sitting in them
As man burns down his own house
to roast his pig
No more chanting Hare Krishna
while Rome burns.
San Francisco’s burning,
Mayakovsky’s Moscow’s burning
the fossil-fuels of life.
Night & the Horse approaches
eating light, heat & power,
and the clouds have trousers.
No time now for the artist to hide
above, beyond, behind the scenes,
indifferent, paring his fingernails,
refining himself out of existence.
No time now for our little literary games,
no time now for our paranoias & hypochondrias,
no time now for fear & loathing,
time now only for light & love.
We have seen the best minds of our generation
destroyed by boredom at poetry readings.
Poetry isn’t a secret society,
It isn’t a temple either.
Secret words & chants won’t do any longer.
The hour of oming is over,
the time of keening come,
a time for keening & rejoicing
over the coming end
of industrial civilization
which is bad for earth & Man.
Time now to face outward
in the full lotus position
with eyes wide open,
Time now to open your mouths
with a new open speech,
time now to communicate with all sentient beings,
All you ‘Poets of the Cities’
hung in museums including myself,
All you poet’s poets writing poetry
about poetry,
All you poetry workshop poets
in the boondock heart of America,
All you housebroken Ezra Pounds,
All you far-out freaked-out cut-up poets,
All you pre-stressed Concrete poets,
All you cunnilingual poets,
All you pay-toilet poets groaning with graffiti,
All you A-train swingers who never swing on birches,
All you masters of the sawmill haiku in the Siberias of America,
All you eyeless unrealists,
All you self-occulting supersurrealists,
All you bedroom visionaries and closet agitpropagators,
All you Groucho Marxist poets
and leisure-class Comrades
who lie around all day and talk about the workingclass proletariat,
All you Catholic anarchists of poetry,
All you Black Mountaineers of poetry,
All you Boston Brahims and Bolinas bucolics,
All you den mothers of poetry,
All you zen brothers of poetry,
All you suicide lovers of poetry,
All you hairy professors of poesie,
All you poetry reviewers
drinking the blood of the poet,
All you Poetry Police -
Where are Whitman’s wild children,
where the great voices speaking out
with a sense of sweetness and sublimity,
where the great’new vision,
the great world-view,
the high prophetic song
of the immense earth
and all that sings in it
And our relations to it -
Poets, descend
to the street of the world once more
And open your minds & eyes
with the old visual delight,
Clear your throat and speak up,
Poetry is dead, long live poetry
with terrible eyes and buffalo strength.
Don’t wait for the Revolution
or it’ll happen without you,
Stop mumbling and speak out
with a new wide-open poetry
with a new commonsensual ‘public surface’
with other subjective levels
or other subversive levels,
a tuning fork in the inner ear
to strike below the surface.
Of your own sweet Self still sing
yet utter ‘the word en-masse -
Poetry the common carrier
for the transportation of the public
to higher places
than other wheels can carry it.
Poetry still falls from the skies
into our streets still open.
They haven’t put up the barricades, yet,
the streets still alive with faces,
lovely men & women still walking there,
still lovely creatures everywhere,
in the eyes of all the secret of all
still buried there,
Whitman’s wild children still sleeping there,
Awake and walk in the open air.

Les

Sympathy
---Robert Service

My Muse is simple,--yet it's nice
To think you don't need to think twice
On words I write.
I reckon I've a common touch
And if you say I cuss too much
I answer: 'Quite!'

I envy not the poet's lot;
He has something I haven't got,
Alas, I know.
But I have something maybe he
Would envy just a mite in me,--
I'm rather low.

For I am cast of common clay,
And from a ditch I fought my way,
And that is why
The while the poet scans the skies,
My gaze is grimly gutterwise,
Earthy am I.

And yet I have a gift, perhaps
Denied to proud poetic chaps
Who scoff at me;
I know the hearts of humble folk;
I too have bowed beneath the yoke:
So let my verse for them evoke
Your sympathy.

Les



Post Edited (01-25-05 03:21)