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

The good...

Come my little eunuchs, my little virgins,
It is time you were home and in bed;
The wind is strong and cold on the streets
And it is almost eleven o'clock.

Soon the whores will be obvious at the corners
And I would not have you accosted or given the eye:
Soon the drunks will be turned out of the beverage rooms
And I would not have you raped in a dark lane.

Go, find your house and insert the key and put down the night-lock.
Undress with the blinds down and touch the pillows, and dream
Of Pickthall walking hand in hand with her fairies
And Lampman turning his back on Ottawa.
                       (from "To the Canadian Poets", Raymond Souster)

The bad... 

All those times I was bored
out of my mind. Holding the log
while he sawed it. Holding
the string while he measured, boards,
distances between things, or pounded
stakes into the ground for rows and rows
of lettuces and beets, which I then (bored)
weeded. Or sat in the back
of the car, or sat still in boats,
sat, sat, while at the prow, stern, wheel
he drove, steered, paddled. It
wasn't even boredom, it was looking,
looking hard and up close at the small
details.
               (from "Bored", Margaret Atwood)
______________________________

Always the saws and boredom with husbands looking predictably like Canadian stereotypes (especially in her fictions): always and intolerably the same, in woods or out. Atwood poetry played to specs like this, of course, makes feminist readings possible and always intolerably the same. Abhorrent...

Souster's Toronto, being more preferable to me because wider and colder, at least doesn't mask its whores and warnings, always as real as the night-lock. And nothing certainly abstains from Ottawa (synonymous with Atwood!) like Acorn among the homeless & unjustly convicted, Plantos with manuscripts under his arm, Purdy turned to stone. Ray's poems have always been for them.The next time Atwood and Ondaatje come skipping by, ready for their next $60 000 dinner, may Souster loose his whores and cold streets on them!