It's a piece of conceptual art, isn't it? We're forced to have the argument about what makes a good poem in part because this little thing calls itself a poem. We can argue about form--is it two lines of loose blank verse stacked in an odd way, or is it syllabic verse (4, 2, 3, 2, 3, 2, 4, 2), or accentual verse (2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1, 2, 1)--or gawd knows what?
Mind you, I don't think it's much of a poem. The intellectual content is actually all right, paralleling the Zen message, "Be here now." But it seems to me an oddity more than a poem, a thing that exists to make us ask why it exists.
P. S. I find it works best when recited in an Elmer Fudd accent.
[This message has been edited by David Mason (edited December 30, 2001).]
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