What Matters Really is Only the Text
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
[This is a poem that is as fouled up as modern literary theory. The
poem fails to be a sonnet.]
What matters really is only THE text.
What critics, theorizers, and such do
Is substitute their thinking, their pretext
As pedantry, as if it were gold too.
Before their fool’s gold stuff is finished, it
Has superseded poetry and play.
They chew the artists’ banquet and then shit
It out in deconstruction—and dismay
The reader and the playwright both. They search
For anything at all, no matter how
Extraneous, that they can grab and lurch
With to some unplanned meaning they can chow
Down on. It’s like the baby cuckoo in
The nest which shoves the true eggs out and, vile,
Shouts out its message. This perverted sin
Is how the ivory towers make their pile.
..The problem’s that this guff gets in the way
…. Of what the actual poets have to say.