By: George J. Searles

HEARTENING IMAGE

Feeling bad? Depressed?
Here’s a little something
to cheer you up.

Picture your enemies, mottled
as med school cadavers,
fleeing through the public square,

shrieking as they’re chased
around and around
the ornamental fountain

by muscular, whip-cracking,
indelicate ex-offenders (or current ones)
in chrome-plated Roman chariots

pulled by gargantuan wolfhounds
who have not had
their Kibbles yet today.

NAME DROPPING

I did this, I did that. I had lunch.
(Notice the obvious influence here
of Frank O’Hara.) Then I went into Nedick’s,
where I knew the counter man
on a first-name basis.
(I’ll confess: That bit’s lifted directly
from William Burroughs.)

I remember one damned thing after another.
(Remember…Joe Brainard?)

The above ellipses must owe something
to Celine, that anti-Semitic bastard—
who was even moreso than Ezra Pound
and T.S. Eliot, fighting in the captain’s quarters
(see Bob Dylan). Who was the worst? Tough call.
Hatred is hard to quantify with precision,
though some might consider Eliot the worst,

because he was the sneakiest about it
and because he was probably the most influential
[as poets go—which (let’s face it) ain’t that far].
Hey—brackets, dashes, parentheses?
Clearly inspired by Jorie Graham, whose messages,
whatever they may purport to be, always elude me
[though I can’t be blamed for admiring her beauty
(which is astonishing—as I’m sure Billy Collins,
an excellent judge of such matters—perhaps the best,
now that Mark Strand and Tom Lux are gone—would agree)].

Even the late/great, crazy-like-a-fox John Ashbury
is easier to parse, one might argue, but then there’s
Leslie Scalapino, Jena Osman, Dara Wier,
and the incomparable Jackson MacLow, all-time
Crown Prince of Something-or-Other. I’ll pass; just give me
Ellen Bass, Carl Dennis, August Kleinzahler, Denise Duhamel,
Campbell McGrath, Sharon Olds, or even the light verse
of John Updike: stuff with, as Aristotle preferred, a beginning,
a middle, and an end—all adding up to something appetizing,
nourishing. Not like this poem (if it is one), which leaves the reader
with—at best—a vague sense of indigestion, or worse…
line after line, stanza after irregular stanza, with no apparent design
or purpose except, perhaps, to satisfy the promise of the title

#1 ON THE TO-DO LIST

Look at some vintage photographs and you’ll see:
All of us—men and women alike—have become

much better looking during the past hundred years,
despite our grotesque piercings and ghastly tattoos.

Now let’s work on getting a whole lot smarter,
starting at once, right away, today.

###

George J. Searles teaches English and Latin at Mohawk Valley Community College (Utica NY) and has also taught creative writing on the upstate campus of Pratt Institute (Brooklyn) and graduate courses for The New School (NYC). Widely published (literary criticism, textbooks, poetry), he is a former Carnegie Foundation “Professor of the Year” and is currently editor of Glimpse, a poetry annual.