aesthetics, bourgeois and otherwise

alec ramsdell a_ramsdell at hotmail.com
Sat Sep 19 14:04:08 PDT 1998


I was dismayed to read Robert Pinsky's, our Poet Laureate's, recent contribution to The New Yorker, "To Television", a truly bad poem. He was a cool swaggering kind of teacher back at poet camp ("I want to write poems, sir!"), and _The Want Bone_ has nice stuff, even if it gets hot and heavy too often.

Anyway, here's a poem chock full of farcical bourgeois melancholy.

Baffled Authorities

Sad little round of life. Like snow-capped statisticians

we scurry through your sewer systems, counting all around

low levels of cold. And dammit if your large master bedrooms still

should not mean but moan, moan but mean, leaning, lunging into nothing. Some poem

to mope the corner nexus, striking little matches like

little stars dressed so strikingly, in the ballroom waltzing swans.

*

A friend of mine tells me last night that Levi's recently approached a few memebers of the former Dead Kennedy's about using their music in some advertising fashion. But Jello Biafra, thankfully, is not allowing it.

Now I got my own mustard gas in my pocket Climb up a tree on a branch and drop it On a country club full of Saturday golfers . . .

--"Chemical Warfare" from _Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables_

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