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Picking a Favorite
I sit with cracked eyeglasses above
The Norton Anthology of Poetry,
Hunched over
Desperate for my favorite
To show itself
I recall with panicked admiration,
Salty envy,
Baby-boy dribble,
The English professors who danced before me in college.
Their words; no, better:
Their lists
Their favorites
The ones they knew by heart
That resided in their
Back pockets.
But I want a favorite.
I want my heart tugged by dead men
Laces tied to the wonders of…
The wonders that impress people.
What is wrong with me?
Am I missing something in my brain…man?
Let me earn this beard.
Skip (too popular): Shakespeare, Donne, Coleridge, Dickinson.
Would be obvious that I lifted right from Freshmen Lit
If they ended up on my
Facebook profile.
Moving on…
Chaucer does not seem hip, though I never read him.
Whitman might be the one (save for later; angry enough?),
William Carlos Williams is short-listed for sure,
And who is Li-Young Lee (b. 1957)?
Too left field? I mean,
There’s a fine art
To blending the hip-known with the unknown.
A list too dense with the latter seems, by item 9,
Deliberate.
And that is so pathetic.
Google: Hughes (can I?), Cummings (sure), Frost (NO WAY!).
And who is this? Bukowski?
It rings a bell.
Faint enough for necessary mystique,
Tough.
A Wikipedia entry
With words and phrases like “economic ambience,”
“Arrested by FBI,”
“Near-fatal bleeding ulcer”
And
“Sean Penn.”
Sweet.
Fairwell, Whitman! Goodbye, Williams! Cummings, see you later!
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Me: “My favorite? Oh, well, I’ve always really loved Bukowski, you know.”
Brett Schwartz
Email: Brett Schwartz
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