4/21/2006

3 poems and 1 ford

i recently remembered i had 2 poems online, as part of the "thank you" zine we whipped up for stephen buckley upon his (2nd) graduation from SFU back in 2004. then, after we'd put in all that effort, he turned around and came back for his masters. now (as of tonight) i'm officially off-campus before him. how does he pull that off?

the poems are "untitled" and "afterthoughts", and you can read 'em here.

also, liam ford is an spankingly good writer (read his blog). he wrote a great review of a bukowski reading/film for kicks magazine called "Impolite Poetry" . read it if you like yourself.

on the subject of mr. ford, and in order to ensure the title of this post makes sense, here's a third poem:

literary revolution

- for liam ford

what if ford and taylor had been poets,
deconstructing and compartmentalizing
poems into images, rhymes, devices, etc.?
an assembly line working all night,
welding on metaphors and greasing the syntax.

think of all the poems we’d have by now:
we’d each get a new one stuffed
in our newspapers every morning,
we’d line our birdcages with them,
throw them as confetti at weddings.

there’d be so many that eventually
we’d stop reading them carefully,
only skimming to that part 2/3rds
of the way down where they throw in
the joke to lighten the mood…
you know, just before it gets heavy.

and we’d like it, of course,
it would be handy and comfortable
unlike the tourette-inspired system of old
where poems would spurt out unannounced
from all sorts of questionable individuals
and locales.

but still, i say god bless the automobile
and ford and taylor and the automated
plague they unleashed upon this earth,
bless them for staying the hell away from
poetry, leaving it to us inefficient schmucks
barking and howling in the woods, mixing
our metaphors in the most unproductive of
fashions, accomplishing little and realizing
that that was exactly the point, all along.

No comments: