June 19, 2006

Donald Hall Is the NewUS Poet Laureate via stupid smelly GarbageFilter, but, like, I totally thought of it too eh

A Poet at Twenty Images leap with him from branch to branch. His eyes brighten, his head cocks, he pauses under a green bough, alert. And when I see him I want to hide him somewhere. The other wood is past the hill. But he will enter it, and find the particular maple. He will walk through the door of the maple, and his arms will pull out of their sockets, and the blood will bubble from his mouth, his ears, his penis, and his nostrils. His body will rot. His body will dry in ropey tatters. Maybe he will grow his body again, three years later. Maybe he won't. There is nothing to do, to keep this from happening. It occurs to me that the greatest gentleness would put a bullet into his bright eye. And when I look in his eye, it is not his eye that I see. --------------------- The Alligator Bride The clock of my days winds down. The cat eats sparrows outside my window. Once, she brought me a small rabbit which we devoured together, under the Empire Table while the men shrieked repossessing the gold umbrella. Now the beard on my clock turns white. My cat stares into dark corners missing her gold umbrella. She is in love with the Alligator Bride. Ah, the tiny fine white teeth! The Bride, propped on her tail in white lace stares from the holes of her eyes. Her stuck-open mouth laughs at minister and people. On bare new wood fourteen tomatoes, a dozen ears of corn, six bottles of white wine, a melon, a cat, broccoli and the Alligator Bride. The color of bubble gum, the consistency of petroleum jelly, wickedness oozes from the palm of my left hand. My cat licks it. I watch the Alligator Bride. Big houses like shabby boulders hold themselves tight in gelatin. I am unable to daydream. The sky is a gun aimed at me. I pull the trigger. The skull of my promises leans in a black closet, gapes with its good mouth for a teat to suck. A bird flies back and forth in my house that is covered by gelatin and the cat leaps at it missing. Under the Empire Table the Alligator Bride lies in her bridal shroud. My left hand leaks on the Chinese carpet.

posted by petebest 18 years ago
  • Thanks, Pete, for posting a couple poems. I'm not familiar with Hall, and I'm happy to read these. Very nice. However, DOUBLE POOOOOST!
  • Poetry is dead as long as it is the reserve of the so-called elite (aka wankers).
  • Sorry to say that I've never heard of him, but my senior seminar in Contemporary American Poetry was more a seminar in Prof. Lye's Rants Against the Administration.
  • (Reecer, not Lye. Apologies. I always confuse the two. Shows you just how much attention I was paying...)
  • However, DOUBLE POOOOOST ain't not neither! is it? I missed it . .
  • Good choice...he was way better than Oates.
  • This may be what BlueHorse is referring to, petes; I posted it to the US poet laureate thread instead of creating a new thread. And I still wish he was Jane Kenyon. I wonder if she would have written about his demise with all the intimate detail he has about her death.
  • My neighbor Rocket88 stole my joke.
  • Poet Laurie ate Poet Hall The 'gator bride Devoured tham all
  • Poetry is dead Except for the fact that petebest posted this FPP, and that beeswacky writes poems left and right, and The Underpants Monster made a nice little poem him/herself, and this, and this, and this, and this,, and I'm just peeved enough by your negativity to call out its meaninglessness.... Watch who you're calling "wanker."
  • What Hawthorne said.
  • Ooops, my 'pologies. I think I conflated the MeFi front page and Bees contribution. I am truly sorry You didn't double post You're a special snowflake You really are the most Love, Your GramMa POETRY IS DEAD, my arse! Step back, you little wankers darlings, and let your GramMa handle this. SKRIK! Watch yo'mouth, bubba! GramMa has a slightly used, week-old, decidedly unpoetic flounder with which she can gobsmack you! And it won't be done with any affection aforthought.
  • If poetry's not dead, why isn't Eminem the US poet laureate? Or Beeswacky. Poetry - the kind of poetry written by cock-suckers who still believe they are the hidden legislators of the world - is dead. The white males who aren't dead yet but live in the past tense, writing their academic wank live on a different planet from the rest of us. Why should we care who the master cock-sucker is?
  • Sooo . . . anyway . . . One of the ideas of our newly minted "PoLau" as we refer to him here in the states (Shhh! Shut up, we do! Yes we do. Oh hush.) is to start an all-poetry radio station on one of the satellite networks. Now personally I think that should be syndicated nationwide, but pay-for-poetry is big these days (please insert money now). Plus it gives me the vision of beeswacky in a small but groovy DJ booth spinning the best in waxed verse and throwing in a few bon mots in-between besides. Which I like. And so I say, US Poet Laureate Donald Hall, good for you! Make it so! And such. Plus, I think TUM would get the overnight shift and us insomniacs would make some more Earl Grey tea at the gold-star-on-white-background kitchen table while a particular and peculiar reverie abounded over the single speaker . . .
  • ... pay for poetry is big these days Oh? Or are ye thinking of Poetry magazine?
  • Ha! Okay my charade has been toppled, there is no poetry for money! Oh the huge manatee! I do like the poetry radio idea, although it would have to be carefully done because you can't just throw a bunch of poems out 24/7. That'd be like a bomb that never stops exploding. . . . Cool.
  • Monkeyfilter: like a bomb that never stops exploding.
  • more like a faucet that won't stop dripping old poets laureate soon ebb away and from popular memory keep on slipping