Sunday, May 22, 2011

Poetry Is Stupid

Poetry is stupid it is really dumb
It makes no sense at all it solves nothing does nothing
Even a mountain makes sense it walks around covered in snow
And holds the sky up
Mountains aren’t stupid poetry is stupid
A man becomes a giant among the stars
Take a chair, Mr. Razamov, and study this hunger
Of gulls as they fish from the edge of the ice
From the South Pole to the deserts of Morocco
And all points in between I challenge you to meet nature face to
         face
And tell me what is dumber the naked truth or a poem
While I am not a Shaolin student, I can tell you this
When we look at very distant galaxies
We see them as they were thousands of millions of years ago
When the light rays started on their journey to us
My hand trembles like a tree
Jingling skeletons in an elevator
Poetry is stupid it is not the same as antifreeze
What shall I do with this absurdity
I will call it a crepitation
I don’t know what’s dumber a poem or a seesaw
I would say a seesaw
In a poem about seesaws
The rain comes and gets everything wet
In the playground and the city
A man walks by with a cellphone
Cupped to his ear and tells his lover
That poetry is stupid it has ruined his life
The man who knows everything is a fool
This is a terrible thing to say
But true a fish walks out of the water with a blunt
Hard head thick skin and gets a job at Boeing
You see how stupid a poem can be
I remember writing a poem once I stayed up all night
And when it was done I took out the garbage
And realized nothing had changed the world was the same
To hell with you and your poetry what the hell do you know about
         it
It’s early summer the rivers are swollen
A baby claps the bearded face of Socrates

3 comments:

Mickey O'Connor said...

Crepitation ? I had to look that one up. Crackling, like crepe paper. John, did you know that Samuel Johnson made the first modern dictionary ? Modern in the sense that before Johnson, at least in English & I believe in other languages, a dictionary merely gave literal definitions of words & Johnson's dictionary did that & supplied instances of the word used in context via various Literary works. I have a facsimile copy of that dictionary , it's 2,400 pages or so, 81/2 X 11 & the print is small. I use it to steal lines from. I don't know if my life was ruined by poetry or was ruined before I became a poet. It got awfully ruined, tho. Now I feel like a fighting rooster, better than I ever felt, even if my life is ruined. Maybe everybody's life is ruined & only devout Buddhist monks & certain poets & skid row drunks understand this. I don't know, that last line is overly romantic.

John Olson said...

I knew Johnson had made the first modern dictionary, but to this day I still haven't seen it. I used to spend hours in the OED. It was like word heaven. The problem with this poem is that it is not stupid enough. I need to fail better next time. I stole that last line from William Carlos Williams. "Struggle of Wings."

Mickey O'Connor said...

yes, more stupid, fail better, yes, steal lines... I've read Worstward Ho by S. Beckett probably 10-20 times & the whole thing is basically him forcing himself to write & picture the scenes to write before he writes them. " say a body where none. say a mind where none. " he slowly imagines a scene & writes it out & sometimes I thought he was describing his own body & mind & other times the scenes on the page & sometimes I think he goes back & forth.