aesthetics, bourgeois and otherwise

[alec ramsdell]

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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