National Poetry
Listening to Elizabeth Alexander read her poetry at the inauguration, I couldn’t held but think that the new President has yet to learn a lesson that I learned many years ago: Don’t hire someone just because you went to school with them. Not that much modern poetry is all that good, or even all that tolerable. Most seems to be really boring prose, broken up into irregular line lengths, with the odd colorful word thrown in for effect:
I went
to the bathroom
this morning
after
a night of drinking
and it was there
that I
polychromatically
decorated
the bowl
If you think writing this kind of bad poetry is easy, you should try it. I find I have to keep stopping myself from writing rhyming stanzas or being too clear. Granted, it flows easily from the pens of some- like our new President, whose undergraduate poetic stylings were featured in the New York Times:
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.
The Times article notes that the poem above was featured in the Spring 1981 issue of “Feast,” a 51-page student literary journal that described itself as “a semi-annual journal of short poetry and fiction collected from the Occidental College community.” The Times article then adds that “The journal is no longer published”, to which I would add “to no one’s surprise.” Luckily for the rest of us, the President decided his core competencies lay in other directions.