Yoko Ono in Poetry
 

Yes. Yoko Ono has a poem in Poetry. It is very short.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...-5b2298c783091

It is very short. Mercifully.

Jayne

Our own (barely posting anymore) Quincy Lehr posted on this on Twitter. He, and Jayne, are right. This is not a mediocre poem. It is a bad poem.

I'm working my through this Poetry. I just got to the 40-page Matthew Dickman poem...let's just say this hasn't been my favorite issue, though there are pieces here and there I enjoyed (fewer than usual, given the 40-page page).

Quincy's twitter seems to be protected and, thus, closed to the likes of me. What did he say? Was it that this poem really sucks? Is there anything more subtle to be said about its suckitude?

Typical Quincy:

"Just going to let this sit here without comment. Because Satan."

But, yes, mostly that the poem sucks...

Whatever.

The poem is bad, Poetry is often bad.

Fly and Plastic Ono Band are better than anything any of the Beatles did solo.

Actually, she's better than the Beatles.

It hardly honors Mother Earth, and, in fact, rather denigrates her -- who is hallowed, among some of us. Plug in your mother's name, and see what I mean:

"We s**t on you, Mom."

Lacking any context -- lovely.

J

There's a lot of it about...

Clive

The poem is abominable, but Poetry has run wretched poems before. Take this abomination from a prominent architectural critic from the magazine's early days:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...er-two-windows

Mrs. Schuyler Van Rensselaer, like Yoko Ono, was mostly known for something else, though her inclusion had less of a starf*cking quality than so much recent editorial practice under the Other Donald (as Kevin Higgins calls him). Does everything in Poetry magazine suck? No. Has the overall trend in recent years been faddish, #woke, and increasingly dumbed-down? Hoo boy!

An amusing side note: Don Share has me blocked on Facebook and Twitter despite my never having directly interacted with him on either platform. I noticed, I think, when I curiously checked to see if there were any Tweets of the Damned about this colossus of contemporary poetry in the almost uniformly wretched Tavi Gevinson issue:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poe...222/fuck-stuck

It's easing up a bit, but the emails from the Poetry Foundation (I let my subscription lapse years ago) have been pretty good about alerting me to my New Least Favorite Thing on a monthly basis for some time now.

Not that I want to say to say that the poem is good (it's not), but I think you're misreading the line. I take it to be doing two things:

1. On the metaphorical register, "we shit on earth" is functioning as a true (if crude) description of how humans, as a whole, treat the planet that supports them. As they admire and dream of the sky (think Elon Musk), they shit on the earth, even though it's the earth, not the sky, that supports them. The line, on this register, is accusatory.

2. But the line also can be taken literally, and there I suspect Ono wants us to think about how shit is a crucial fertilizer—in this sense it's *because* we (and other creatures) shit on earth that earth "gives birth / to our future." On this register, the poem is again contrasting our admiration of the sky with our relation to the earth, only now to suggest that something we think of as disgusting is in fact honorable and important.

In neither case do I think the poem can be plausibly read as denigrating the earth.

Anyway, there's my detailed analysis of a poem that didn't deserve it.