Left Bank Poetics, 2014
Don't seek our poets in the garret.
Stored softly now in a gulag
Of deconstructed ivory
Towering orthodoxies
Disambiguated truths
Mutual assurance
of progressive correctness
post modernly detached
Insensate to life
In the muddied streets, the flown over
Emptiness peopled by those
They can not reach, they will not hear
To whom they never speak.
About this: The American Academy of Poets publishes a poem each day, mostly written by academics. Each poem is accompanied by a note, like this. Often the notes, especially from the academic poets, are more obscure than the poems - which are not themselves models of communication.
For example, one recent explanation read: “This poem contends with ego-pain in a context of non-duality. . . . But if everything is everything, then everything is everything”.
My poem was inspired by this ‘explanation’ of a work called Translator’s Dilemma:
“The idea of the ordinary interests me in relation to a poetics of necessity, which is in turn connected to my long standing delight in what George Oppen called ‘small nouns’.”
And still they wonder why no one buys the stuff!