Thursday, April 8, 2010

A poetry reading

Eliot and Keats sound just as you’d expect:
one nasal, one booming, both buoyed by affect.
I scoured the files and at last found Ms. Plath,
whose rage was more definite than I had empathed.
We grew up with Ginsberg and Dylan’s a given.
In fact, there’s no trouble with poets still livin’.

It haunts me, the voices that I’ll never hear,
though the tone and the diction resound in my ear.
Have you wondered, at times, of the timbre of Dickens,
or if Sappho’s drawl made the Grecian pulse quicken?
I stay up at night, just tossing and thinkin’
how sad it is never to listen to Lincoln.

2 comments:

  1. These theme lists are great, and your rhyme is mostly unobtrusive and clever (except 'empathed,' which made me cringe, though on second thought that fits with much of how i think of Plath... so...).

    I was thinking at first that this was a sonnet. really, one more couplet in the first stanza and you've got one, turn and all.

    my weekly pump of ashbery, who wrote a list poem on writers and their sleep habits that i adore: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182859

    enjoyed this muchly.

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  2. I bet Sappho did make the Grecian pulse quicken...

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