Too many poets

Jul 14 19:25 UTC 1993

               EXPLOSION

"...the current explosion of poets..."
    -- Eliot Weinberger, 
      _American Poetry Since 1950_

A quiet *pop*, with liquid overtones,
And suddenly the sky is filled with parts
Of current versifiers.  Blood, brains, bones
Rain down, and empty stomachs, and full hearts.
No more the feet, now strewn, of these upstarts
Will start up steep Parnassus; no more groans
Of lost ideals, or innocence, or sweethearts,
Or anything, from these disjunct unknowns.

And what will Time, that worships language, think of
All this?  That once our pleasure was too rare;
And so we made loads of it, all those workshopped-
To-sameness crates of vin quite ordinaire;
And then, incredibly, it was the ink of
Ten million lines a year; and then it stopped.

response 2 of 4:

Jul 14 23:44 UTC 1993

They done blowed up *real* good!

response 4 of 4:

Oct 11 14:38 UTC 1993

[There's an allusion to W.H. Auden in #0.  "...time, that worships
language..." refers to Auden's "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" where he
says, "Time, that is intolerant Of the Brave and innocent And
indifferent in a week To a Beautiful physique, Worships language,
and forgives Everyone by whom it lives."  Over the weekend I made
the depressing discovery that Auden edited these lines out of his
_Collected Poetry_.  There is a new book called _The English Auden_
that restores the Yeats poem to its original form, along with many
other poems that Auden tampered with later on.]