Iole 1 - Devolution of a Poet

Thursday, September 15, 2005

I used to try to write in the voice of the poetry greats
Never Shakespeare or Yeats, mind you.
But Coleridge, Tennyson, Wordsworth, Rainer Marie Rilke
These were my gurus.
They were profound
And naturally, at sixteen, so was I.
In those days writing
Was like dressing up to take part in a play:
I wore the words magnificently, like costumes–or so I thought.
My poems paraded before me
Epic pieces on Love, Justice, Redemption
The Great Unknown.
Much later, dusting off the gold filigreed notebook
I realized that all this while
The words had been wearing me!
Feeling the need to show my poems who was boss
I trimmed off their tassels
Threw out their feather boas
Like a compulsive mother I spat
And wiped off their faces
Trying to reveal what lay
Beneath all that theatrical foundation.
Obsessed with life and its infinite detail
Suddenly everything that could be held still
Could be a poem:
A rotten leaf;
A sunflower in an empty Corona bottle
Beside my dorm-room bed;
The lone hair I had pulled out of my chin that morning.
More honest now, less shy,
My poems and I became fast friends.
No longer seeking profundity
Still desperately seeking self
We held hands, went out for coffees
Smoked cigarettes together.
Amid the deluge of pop-song poetics
I managed to produce one or two truly remarkable
Phrases–if I do say so myself.
Nowadays writing is a more tiresome and questionable endeavour
Like digging for semi-precious rocks
In an abandoned mine field.
Saved from my earlier delusion
I know now that not everything can be a poem.
Sometimes a rotten leaf should be allowed to be just that.
An empty beer bottle masquerading as a vase
No longer seems quite as avant-garde
And as for that hair on my chinny-chin-chin
Well, it just seems less hilarious now
That I live under the constant threat of triteness blowing
The pages that double as my weekly shopping list
Into shreds