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

The good...

Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human–and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate? . . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
                                                              (from the "Ninth Elegy", Rilke)

The bad...

We maintain a critical distance
from the sad spaniel gentlemen

in cravats
on the plaid duvet

at the Custom Hotel,
Los Angeles.

We are so over it.
We fly

from terminal
to terminal

almost endlessly.

We are almost
money.

We can wait
at high speed.
         ("Custom" by Rae Armantrout)
___________________________

Try capturing 'eternity' in the fall of the poet's laurel: oh! you  silly avants who've been cornered long ago and thought you'd never run out of room. Even stupid enough to think the world's been the repository of creative tensions all along: a place of fateful angels. Perse had accepted his laurels in '60 as a harbinger of precisely this. Where were you? Well, don't look now. I mean I can't even homage significant differences in this case-- breaking it down into two sides--because (besides being laughable) it'd soon turn into a staring contest and the winner would certainly go to the sturdiest brow and most penetrating eye. Nothing in the poetry is worth mentioning. But in America it just won't go to brows and insight. The look of the thing might go happily to American cute cheeks and some contrasting eye-glinting sparkle to take to the Pulitzer podium: not just the poem for which we can wait but a little eyeliner and pearls, even in mid-life. Tributes to dogs and duvet floors will carry the day at LA X. And between Rilke and Armantrout: well, cutes and sparkles win hands down every time!