Poetry

 

 

Chris O'Carroll

Technically, I Did Promise You a Rose Garden

(epithalamion for J&A)

This spot they picked out to get spliced is nice,
But any venue, really, would suffice.

He'd wed her at the town dump if he could.
Like Oscar grouching up the neighborhood,

He'd summit some great pile of trash and holler,
"Junk's heaped up tall here, but our love's heaped taller!"

He'd wed her in the rain, or on a train,
Or with green eggs and ham. He'd be insane

If there were anyplace he wouldn't say
The glad "I do" the garden heard today.

This ceremony that makes one of two
Would work at Machu Picchu in Peru.

These vows would work in far-off Timbuktu,
Or even at the circus, at the zoo.

He'd marry her in jail, in outer space.
With all their options, though, they chose this place,

As if to say, "I take you root and bloom,
I take the thorns, I take the vast perfume

That we'll inhale with every breath we share
As what we plant here flowers everywhere."

 

To a Defender of Poetic Tradition

You know how people look like fools when they
Diss formal verse as fusty and passé?
When they call meter a straitjacket, rhyme
A lifeless fossil from a bygone time?
Well, that's how foolish you look when you damn
With cognate cluelessness the sins of slam.

You say slam poets seem to prize cheap thrills
And edgy topics more than verbal skills.
You grumble that they're all pierced, tattooed,
Unversed in subtle wordplay, "urban," crude.
Their hip-hop histrionics on the stage,
You sneer, can't match your deep thoughts on the page.

Thank God your coded ethnic slurs aren't cheap,
And your disdain for skin art is so deep.
The way you pierce the surface, plumb the core,
When you anatomize what you abhor
Saves you from sounding like some shallow jerk
With his head jammed up his collected work.

Are there particular slam poems you hate?
I might agree. I wouldn't hesitate
To say some slammers suck, if you'll admit
Page poets, too, sometimes write dreadful shit.
There's good work in both camps, and both include
Some poems as lousy as your attitude.

It's generally unwise to generalize
About whole genres when you criticize.
Keep it specific; broad-brush imprecision
Makes you an easy target for derision.
Slammers, you charge, talk dirty. Which is true.
But so did Shakespeare. So do I. Fuck you.

 

 

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