POETRY WORKSHOP
On the Office door a notice proclaimed
in Bold Caps:
THIS ROOM IS ALARMED
.
I’m not surprised. In the room next door,
labelled
CRAFT
, those crafty poets
spewed half-digested metaphor,
vomited verbs and gruesome gobbets
of pain and passion and pertinent perception
in a glutinous mess of sensuous description,
the broth of their slimy lives, thick
with greasy irony.
Office computers
capture the world’s clichés:
CLICK,
PRINT
— a million clones are hatched
in arid
Arial
crisply etched
on reams of recycled, hygienically bleached,
copy paper.
But the poetry rabble,
to flatter their tutor, endlessly scribbled
in scruffy notebooks their gibble-gabble,
in smeary pencil or biro that dribbled,
with crossings out and underscore.
What on earth are poets for?
Return to Index
Return to Home