April is poetry month: what's good and what's not

The good...

Above the fresh ruffles of the surf

Bright striped urchins flay each other with sand.

They have contrived a conquest for shell shucks,

And their fingers crumble fragments of baked weed

Gaily digging and scattering.

And in answer to their treble interjections

The sun beats lightning on the waves,

The waves fold thunder on the sand;

And could they hear me I would tell them:

O brilliant kids, frisk with your dog,

Fondle your shells and sticks, bleached

By time and the elements; but there is a line

You must not cross nor ever trust beyond it

Spry cordage of your bodies to caresses

Too lichen-faithful from too wide a breast.

The bottom of the sea is cruel.

                                     (from Voyages, Hart Crane)

The bad...

Awkward grammar appals a craftsman A Dada bard

as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art and scrawls an

alpha (a slapdash arc and a backward zag) that mars

all stanzas and jams all ballads (what a scandal). A

A madcap vandal crafts a small black ankh- a hand-

stamp that can stamp a wax pad and at last plant a, etc

                                         (from Eunoia, Christian Bök)

__________________________

    Vowels have never looked like tiny white coffins (for children) strewn across the hangar floor, at least not til now. The only 'A' more horrific than this is Zukofsky's (Samperi was right to note its hellishness).Take a look at them. This is a Shoah. A wise man a little more generously said, "...conceptual writing is a con, a long hit of laughing gas, a pseudo-intellectual's wet dream. Taking it seriously is dimwitted, although it can, evidently, lead to tenure, where every day is "poetry" month." And that's that.

Crane, on the other hand, can visit this without upsetting a single fragment, the urchins safe at play, language of shores falling freely between their fingers. Like a wise parent cautioning against the pseudo-doctors who save themselves the trouble of lopping off heads and feet and use children instead, he draws a line in the sand for them and gives the colours, shades and textures of real sea graves as warning. Poets like wise parents caution always against transgressions and transgressors. Crane at least died knowing what lay beyond. A sea's cruel nursing breast...