The Slither
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
~ Ezra Pound
Two Years Later
The eyes of shock remain
Electric sockets burnt out in the skull.
The beauty of man never disappears
But drives a blue car through the parking lot.
~ John Wieners
The stanzas of the parking lots and trains
Beneath the ground assert their claim to jilt
The Bashos of the world and say that gains
Are made by jettisoning both rhyme and lilt
For images alone. A solitude
Results with pics (or sounds
Of screeching brakes thrown in), verse nude
Of other glories. They are out of bounds
For stripped down verses. Shakespeare is not good
Enough and Wordsworth is to blame. Men’s speech
He said, the common talking phrases should
Subvert true beauty, suck it like a leech.
That cures the ills of centuries of the tried
And true. Thus came the free verse fatal slide.
~ Phillip Whidden
by phillipw | Aug 9, 2024 | Uncategorized |