So the first poem I'm going to read is called For The Poets.
And one of the things we talked about in my class
are our haibun, which is this hybrid form that
comes from Japan, which in its classic form
is a paragraph or two of travelogue.
Today, we went to Mount Fuji, and we saw this,
and this happened, and this happened.
And then at the bottom would be a haiku
that would be like a distillation of the journey.
And I got very interested in haibuns
where the journey part was interior.
So this is a haibun, and it has all these allusions.
It quotes from Beowulf and The Iliad and the rock group, The
Who, Tommy, the opera, Tommy.
There's a reference to Miss D, who is Dickinson
and Uncle Walt, Walt Whitman.
And I'm telling you that because I'm a teacher,
and you must provide your citations.
For The Poets.
To post, to share, to tag, to tweet,
to have an audience for feats, Beowulf
granted the glory of winning.
Grendel driven under the fen banks fatally hurt,
and the whole panoply of insulted Greeks.
Agamemnon, the most grasping man alive.
But who, if I cried out, would hear me
amongst the angelic orders, is the common condition.
If only three people like a tweet, does anything
you offer sound in the forest.
The history of civilization is replete with selfies
from pharaonic monoliths to portraits hanging in the Louvre.
Lucius was here, scratched in Latin on Coliseum walls.
Even the earliest handprints in the famous caves.
We've always been Tommies.
See me, feel me, touch me, heal me.
Climbing platforms to sashay the wealth.
Not plunder now, but diamond contacts, accolades,
and golden news.
The flashy bling of being seen, such dread and hope and fear
to hope that the work will live in some greater
way in other minds.
The confrontation with time and wanting to matter while
inside it.
I'm nobody.
Who are you?
Miss D's morning cleanse, or uncle Walt's Jupiter tonic.
I celebrate myself, which is to say,
I was heading into one last student
reading at a college I was leaving
to hear first poems about Earth and sex and blood
and stars, about the great forces, and the dispossessed.
Parents, harm, and the boot of the state.
Why, I thought, do any of us do any of this?
And then verse came, such as it was.
I was here.
I lived in it.
I died in it.
This shit Paradiso.