Showing posts with label Jayne Cortez. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jayne Cortez. Show all posts

Thursday, January 8, 2015

Fair Warning.


This is just a fair warning that there is some of my awful poetry below. And it really is awful. This is all, like, first draft quality stuff. Recently I was talking to a guy I’d just met and poetry came up and he asked if I was a poet and I said that I write poetry but I am not a poet and he said well if you write poetry how are you not a poet and I said that I have too much respect for the people who do it well to call myself one.

And anyway, I much prefer saying that I am “a writer”. When I say to someone that I am "a writer" what I am actually thinking in my head is that I am like a ninja’s Swiss Army Knife, but with words. Anyway, that’s always my subtext.

But you were asking about poetry.

Yeah, there is some below.

I always feel the need to preface my poetry posts with a preemptive apology like this one. Writing these apology posts about poetry always make me think of a poem by Jayne Cortez. That poem is actually called “Poetry”. Luckily for you I have the collection that it is in ... let me find it real quick … hold on … okay, here it is … the poem called “Poetry” is about poetry and here it is the part of the poem I am always reminded of when I apologize for my poetry:

Today poems are like flags
flying on liquor store roof
poems are like baboons
waiting to be fed by tourists

So there you go folks. If and when I ever get a collection of poetry published, I am going to get Jayne Cortez to blurb that about me.


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WAIT!


WAIT!

One more Jayne Cortez thing. If you ever have the chance to flip through her collection Somewhere in Advance of Nowhere, be sure to read the poem “These New York City Pigeons”. I love it. This is probably my favorite stanza:

New York City pigeons
flap viral feather fungus dust from wings to faces
then sit on steps vocalizing & waiting
for the death of humankind

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