By: Mark A. Murphy

Critique of Critical Criticism

Should we turn a blind eye to those acolytes
of critical criticism, or note
with all due attention, the ‘inability to resolve the tension
between the lyrical and erotic’
in a given piece of work? We ruffians, all,
might well declare such wrist-slapping
as phoney, thinking as we do,
that the learned man is out to double-cross or bamboozle.
For us, neophyte poets, lay men and women
of the thronging masses,
the moon might yet bring woman to man,
despite the ‘reservations’ of the academic heavyweights.

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Rhetoric and Prosody

Anyone acquainted with the ideas of Professor Bloom
will find nothing fortuitous in their return
from the dead, disagreeable
though they may be, as a dose of the pox.
Who really listens to the discourse of canon makers,
bloody-minded, as they are, those champions
of the literary big talk –
denying access, once again, to the plebeian poets,
who lack cohesion in the parlance of love…
(archaic and moribund, boorish and confessional)
voicing their dissent
at the city limits, outside the seats of learning?

Would the Sterling professor, the son of a garment worker
in the Yiddish speaking Bronx
and Orthodox Jew, care to tell us why
the poor infant in the ghetto (in all likelihood) won’t grow up
to be a canonical poet?
All influences aside, no one knows, categorically,
why we write, or what is ultimately meant
by taking one symbol over another,
only that those pale Nordic tits might well bring comfort
to the (in)famous and the damned,
though the egoist Professor Bloom still clinging to life –
remains unflappable in his patrician conceit.