Bitter Poetaste in Mouth
Lightweight free-verse exploration,
withered ghosts and wisps of phrase,
breezy unamusing musings
barely raise
a titter, tear or lyric warning –
fail to reach a middling height;
then subside to shallow murmurs
(not quite).
Teenage existentialism
cryptic, dull confessional mush;
suitable for a poker-faced
unroyal flush.
Must you set this stuff in motion
fizzling through our universe:
half-bright comets leaving trails
of boring verse?
Incoherent thoughts meander
through your words like fish through nets
unable to ensnare your reader.
One forgets
whatever it was you started saying
(weirdly spaced, unpunctuated).
Could it be such thoughts are better
left unstated?
And now here comes the major modern poetry killer, John Ashbery, hailed, worshiped and emulated the world over. I knew him, reader, back at Harvard, if only slightly. The closest I came was years later, when I ran into a common friend of ours who was off to visit John in the hospital and persuaded me to tag along. I forget what Ashbery was ailing from that had bedded him, as well as what may have been said in that threesome.
More perpendicularly, he proved amiable but distant the rare times we may have crossed paths, as amiable, I imagine, as when he smilingly murdered poetry.