GK: April is poetry month and I have just three problems with poetry: narcissism, gloominess, and obscurity ---- the poet living in his own head complaining about some vague thing he can't explain ---- there's a lot of that out there. Because people write poems in order to express themselves, which is looking through the wrong end of the telescope. Poetry can be lucrative. Allen Ginsberg did very well with Howl:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness,
starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking
for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly
connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night.
Allen lived a very comfortable life off that screech against capitalism and mainstream culture.
There's no business like poetry
It makes money, you know.
You just toss out a bunch of naked feeling
All about how sad you are and lost
And how thanks to nature you are healing
Which you are stealing from Robert Frost
The right poems aren't light poems
Avoid comedy, please.
Write about a day when it is pouring rain,
Your sweetheart left you, you missed the train,
And you're looking through a busted windowpane,
And you know you're insane.
There's no figure like metaphor
To make images glow.
Put a bowl of flowers on a table,
Add a setting sun and a rainbow
Put some golden leaves on a maple
And you'll be able to make some dough.
Free verse is for me verse
Don't use meter and rhyme.
Write about the night you ran away from home
In a ragtop Chevy with whitewalls and chrome,
And the black-haired woman who you met in Rome
And you've got you a poem.
There's no business like poetry
I tell you, sir, it's true
You come into a town and give a reading
Your lamentations crying out to God
How life has left you agonized and bleeding
You end the meeting and they applaud.
There's no people like English majors
They write when they are low
Even though their poems you can't comprehend
The way they turn and twist and bend
Still you're very happy when you reach the end
Let's all write a poem
Let's all write a poem.