Introduction

The meaning of life is why

you have to walk through slush to find a hole in your shoe.

The meaning of death is how

they can appoint a novelist U.S. Poet Laureate because he supported

the New Criticism after it was overthrown by deconstruction,

which thinks it oversees Marx and Sartre, Baraka and Ginsberg

(who howls: you can compose

long lines

without getting too

prosy).

In between I have my existence with sober sonnets, nifty neologisms,

conciliatory constructions, brilliant breakthroughs and non-alliterative

metrical fantasies in dactylic hexameter mixed with jus’ rappin’”.

But listen! I reject

Pascal and all those others who wager God

is not a Beat

(thinking that’s something you tap your toe to --

of course after business hours when no one’s watching).

I know how to learn from Eliot

without retrenching in Chaucer.

For I have heard old Hesiod, to whom

the Muses gave power over lies and truth,

and who consequently told how Prometheus thought he could out-trick Zeus,

and how the North Wind will blow your hide off

if you don’t cover it with those of other creatures,

in poetry. And too

I took the cure with Doctor Joyce,

the Irishman of cosmic voice,

who utilized the present form

to criticize an uptight swarm:

he wrote (in meter, if one parses)

of “arses purgative-catharsis.”

Therefore let us relax the sphincter,

convinced our attitude’s distincter

(with poetic posture gained from business end of prosaic procedures;

thus add nose to ear and eye.)

The earth awaits, full of seed,

as we begin.

(written at a time in the mid 1980s that I did not record)

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