The Trouble with Poets
The Trouble with Poets
- They say poets dance on bars and drink mescal out of dirty glasses, while prose writers stand by the exit sign with a travel size Germ-X in their pockets, worrying about twisted ankles and the likely head injury when someone takes a tumble and hits the concrete floor. Poets do not have health insurance. (The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there, nearly killed me for asking for the loan of a glass of beer…)
- Poets wake up from their head injury/hangover and the one remaining profound thought in their pickled brains comes out in perfect iambic pentameter. (The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, and his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold; and the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea, when the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee…)
- Poets never have to be concerned about what happens next. In poetry, the answer is always sex or death. (April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain...) In prose, the answer is also sex or death, but we are forced to come up with a plausible plot to get from here to there.
- Poets can justify their ridiculous love affairs as research. (Why should I blame her that she filled my days with misery…)
- Poets finish work by 11:30 am, having crawled out of bed around 10. They count time in the shower and drinking coffee as work time. They think in rhythm and rhyme and awesome alliteration. (He holds him with his skinny hand, “There was a ship,” quoth he. “Hold off! Unhand me, grey-beard loon!”)
- Poets do not take their medication, since the manic phase is so much fun. (In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure dome decree where Alph the sacred river ran through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea…)
- Poets can ask questions for which there are no answers, and do this without annoying anyone. (What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?)
- It is impossible to hold a grudge against a poet. (This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox…)
- The trouble with poets is they say what we didn’t know we were thinking.
Poem in Praise of Menstruation by Lucille Clifton
if there is a river
more beautiful than this
bright as the blood
red edge of the moon if
there is a river
more faithful than this
returning each month
to the same delta if there
is a river
braver than this
coming and coming in a surge
of passion, of pain if there is
a river
more ancient than this
daughter of eve
mother of cain and of abel if there is in
the universe such a river if
there is some where water
more powerful than this wild
water
pray that it flows also
through animals
beautiful and faithful and ancient
and female and brave