New Poems is a series of poems written over the years but never submitted to any journal. It’s unclear where they stand on the continuum from first draft to finished. All I can attest is that they exist as files on a computer.
The poet and his words
can be hurtful
when they are not
being beautiful,
when they are meant
for private communication
rather than public consumption,
when they are intimate,
when they address a lover,
the reality of love,
of living together,
of a life, one’s own,
not the business
of poetry,
of the poet’s
unacknowledged
legislating
for the world,
for its lovers
of poetry,
lovers of the poet,
the poet’s many fans,
many students,
many admirers,
the performative poet,
Parnassian poet,
poetic poet,
poet making his words,
making his world,
as the poet wants it to be,
as the poet wants to be
in the world,
adored, admired,
adumbrated, like
a Biblical motif,
a cultural meme,
central, ineluctable,
indelible,
here today,
here tomorrow,
let the rest of us
clean up
the poet’s mess.
Notes
First off, I want to acknowledge that I changed the parameters of this series—New Poems—to include any poem that exists as a file on my computer but has never been submitted to any journal for publication. Before, it was poems written or revised in the past five years. That excludes a lot of poems that I may want to share. So. There you have it.
This poem was written on the morning of Saturday, December 13, 2014. At the start of 2014, I started keeping a journal, which I had not done for years. I committed to writing a poem in that journal every day. Looks like that commitment soon fell into the breach, but there are nevertheless a bunch of poems in that journal.
My journal entry for that morning includes the following:
I don’t even want to go over the ways he made me hurt and angry yesterday morning and night with his words. The poet and his words (that’s the title and/or opening line of the next poem).
So it looks like I may have quipped “the poet and his words” while writing the journal entry, then chose to use that phrase as the title and opening line of the poem, then went back to the journal entry after writing the poem to indicate that the quip had evolved into a poem.
No craft notes or any other clever comments. The poem says it all.
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