Chrsty, ummmm...

You do have a life, don't you *grin*

Actually, you could probably get that last one published!

[This message has been edited by Jerry Glenn Hartwig (edited September 14, 2004).]

You guuuuuys, these aren't putrid, they're entertaining. C'mon, I know you can do better. I mean worse.

Oh, c'mon now, I used "weiner" in a poem!

WHO KNOWS WHAT I COULD HAVE DONE ?

Our doubts are traitors / And make us lose the good we oft might win / By fearing to attempt.-- Lucio, Act I, Scene 4, Measure for Measure, Shakespeare

If only my old patron were wiser,
A little richer, more discerning, my--
His statue lays with marble trash, the miser.
My work, my lovely work of art will die.
To be reduced to lime for mortar, that
Is her ignoble fate. Her arms are gone,
Here smooth surface marred. She is lying flat
Upon the ground, and I was just a pawn
With no authority to save my best
Artistic chance, the subtle twist from brow
To legs, the novel draping cloth, the rest
Of my ideas, all will be lost now.
Is fame and fortune what I really want?
Oh God, where is my Admiral Dumont?

Thomas -

I think you've found your metier!

Jorie Graham's Laundry List

Silky bras and panties
wisp under my fingers,
making of their unison (turning, re-
............................infolding,
entering and exiting their own unison in unison).
snow having made me
.....a world of bone
seen through to,
her mantle of weather.
It has a fine inner lining but it is
as an exterior that you see it — a grace.
The coat, which is itself a ramification, a city,
floats vulnerably above another city, ours,

I have put on my doubting, my wager, it is cold.

a coat for the ages —
.....one layer a movie of bluest blue,
one layer the war-room mappers and their friends
must — it tangles up into a weave,
.....tied up with votive offerings — laws, electricity — parts
of a puzzle unsolvable
till the edges give a bit.
oh what is there to finish? -- his robes made
...rustic by the reddish swirl,
through which infinity threads itself,
also oblivion, of course, the aftershocks of something
at the end of the day, deep, reddish-gold, bathing the walls;
I watched, at noon, through slatted wooden blinds,
a man and woman, naked, eyes closed,
down there, where you are entertained
again. Have taken the dead cordless ones, the yellow bits past apogee,
the faded cloth, the pollen-free abandoned marriage-hymn.

All this was written on the next day's list,
turning the list into its spatial-form at last,
into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony . . .
It has a hole in it. Not only where I

...........................concentrate.
I say iridescent and I look down.
This is the simplest form
of current: Blue
moving through blue;
The way things work
is that eventually
something catches.
Saturdays we buy the cloth.
When Bruna finishes her dress
it is the shape of what has come
drenched in the white veil (day).

Wrecks left at the bottom, yes--before this list you hold
in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.

Steven, yours is so impressively believable I'm half afraid of complimenting you on its badness. Is this some kind of test? Is it really some incredibly famous poem that anyone who's anyone should immediately have recognized and lauded as brilliant? I can totally see running across this in some hoity-toity journal, hating it, and feeling sort of cowed and embarrassed about my inability to penetrate its wispy depths.

HE (Leicester, reincarnated) MOURNS FOR THE CHANGE THAT HAS COME UPON HIM AND HIS BELOVED (Queen Elizabeth I, reincarnated), AND LONGS FOR THE END OF THE WORLD


Who knows what I could have done
if the United Nations would have given me a title?
But here I am, un-UN-titled,
and that's why the country is a mess...
and what you should do about it is reclaim the throne, dearest Lizzy.
Why did you break up with me?
I'm still crazy about you. Re-love the shards of my soul.
How the Church ruined my life!
How the nation ruined my life!
Yet still, these alabaster breasts invade my dreams
with yesterday's wind. Tomorrow's sigh is a Tempest
considering quantum theory.
After reading Sylvia Plath's Ariel
this modern verse seems like Jorie Graham's laundry list,
like my immortalized dog fucking in Central Park.
O world, be nobler.
O writers, write nobler, like Shakespeare,
in a style owed to a great poet.
And friend, don't forget the unexpected uses
of giblets.


Robert Meyer

Rose:

Aside from the first two lines, which I wrote myself (and let's not get into what sort of sexual frustration might have led me to write about Jorie Graham's underwear), all of these lines are taken from existing Jorie Graham poems. I simply lifted and rearranged them piecemeal to create something that had a vague laundry/clothing (and list) theme and that made about as much sense as the originals.

------------------
Steve Schroeder

[This message has been edited by Steven Schroeder (edited September 16, 2004).]

My, my, Robert! You've made the rest of our petty poems obsolete with that terrifyingly horrible masterpiece. Bravo!

(Should we come up with a few more putrid titles for you to work with?)

[This message has been edited by Elsie Bareta (edited September 16, 2004).]