Charles Bernstein took a look at the dark side of Poetry Month: (via Maud Newton)
April is the cruelest month for poetry.
As part of the spring ritual of National Poetry Month, poets are symbolically dragged into the public square in order to be humiliated with the claim that their product has not achieved sufficient market penetration and must be revived by the Artificial Resuscitation Foundation (ARF) lest the art form collapse from its own incompetence, irrelevance, and as a result of the general disinterest among the broad masses of the American People.
The motto of ARF's National Poetry Month is: "Poetry's not so bad, really."
I've never been inclined to write poetry, though I admire people who do. The only poem I've ever written, since mandatory efforts in grade school, was an ode to poets. (It too was composed mandatorily, when my daughter needed a duo for a speech competition. She didn't use it, which was probably a good thing.)
So, with apologies to poets and the ellipses-phobic, here it is:
A Poem for Two Voices
Poets aren't like the rest of us.
Poets are perverse.
They see their world...a bit differently...
They see their world in black, white, in fierce Technicolor.
Poets stuff their world with dazzling words.
Perverse words.
Poets climb out of the ruts of prose...
And wallow in their surroundings.
A poet paints the savage terrain of her environment...
With a palette...of words.
A street becomes a metaphor,
A desert, a symbol.
A patch of fog...
A poem.
And America, as we know it,
Becomes Beautiful.
I think we'll all agree it's less cruel if I stick to the less demanding prose form known as blogging.
