Author Archives: Chado

Do What Thou Art

 

 

Those pervy bros Podesta:
Collector’s breed apart;
Both share a nasty interest
In a type of sordid art;
Depicting painted victims,
Raped kids in disarray;
Their taste projects the symptoms
Of what their souls display.
Such themes as fill their mansions
And cloistered halls of power
Reveal some dark delusions
And what they would devour.
Our capital’s elitists
Show plainly what they are
The price of their admission
Won’t get them very far.

 

PODESTA COLLECTION

 


PROMPT #4:

write your own poem about living with a piece of art.

 

 

The Drafty Hall

Donald Hall said in a recent interview with The Writer magazine that most of his poems go through something like 100 drafts. He says none of his published poems have gone through less than 50… and that he revised one of his poems 400 times.

This may make artistic sense, but it hardly makes economic sense.
(To be fair, neither does writing poetry.)

Let’s be generous and say that Hall is paid at the top of the scale and gets $50 for one of his poems. Let’s also assume that he’s fast… and each draft only takes him a half-hour to revise and rewrite.

With 100 drafts, that’s a minimum of 50 hours of labor to produce one poem paying $50. That comes out to a dollar an hour – or less than one-fifth of minimum wage.

by Bob Bly @  Early to Rise: Is Donald Hall Insane?

To Frank O’Hara

 

 

You’re clearly, clearly not a poet, Frank;
More a symptom of modernist sickness.
Inflict no further such rambling thickness
Upon your readers. Here it is point-blank:
Beat-up prose scribblers’ quaint observations
May charm their author—but bore us to tears.
Dull poems age poorly. The passing years
Condemn them as quirky obfuscations.

Your buddy Ashbery: another dud,
Remembered by Department Heads, at best:
Abstract expressions that fall with a thud.
Bury them in a chap-book with the rest 
Of the beatnik bards, whose typing careers
Only confirm our worst poetic fears.

 


PROMPT #3:

write a poem that obliquely explains why you are a poet
and not some other kind of artist –
explain why you are that and not something else!

 

I’m not the only member of the Frank O’Hara Fan Club !

 

To a Yogini

 

         मोक्ष

You with the Hindu tattoo: Namasté.
I wrote you some verse. There’s no other way.

We met at the Moksha conference last spring—
Just wondered how you had been worshipping.

The God in me greets the Goddess in you:
As sure as one must be followed by two—

Listen, I was thinking: before you buy
The used mantra set from that guru guy,

I meant to ask: How’s your situation?
Still affected by Siddharthafication ?

You all prana-ed up?  You might need to sit,
Just to lower your vibrations a bit . . .

Sure as that there are only two genders,
There’s only one God. We’re all offenders.

Contemplate that. Breathe. Just be here right now.
(Don’t mean to act holier-than-thou,

But the stench of truth is wafting your way
Like a whiff of bloated carcass rotting in an Apple™ sweatshop.)

 

 


PROMPT #2 : write a poem that directly addresses someone, and that includes a made-up word,
an odd/unusual simile, a statement of “fact,” and something that seems out of place in time.