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Exuding From A Young Poet's Troubled And Poignant Heart
"How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavoured to form? . . . fearing each sound as if it were to announce the approach of the demoniacal corpse to which I had so miserably given life. . . . animation could not be so hideous as that wretch. I had gazed on him while unfinished; he was ugly then . . . ."
---Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, chapter 5
"So I would have had him leave . . . ."
---T. S Eliot, "La Figlia Che Piange"
He writes only from his trouble heart's
candid and unrefined exudations---
the chaos of the lovelorns' conniptions---
always the same, in many variations
that are, when examined simply redescriptions
of the selfsame words and conditions
that he regularly imposes---so many repetitions,
like long intervals of afterdinner farts.
The words of old scholars in even older books
are not, in his opinion, even worth his second looks;
lile rhyme, measure, and other poetic conventions
(these interfere with his emotions' pretensions,
and with his primary intention
to enter that difficultly achieved dimension
in which he can bask in readers' attention:
the purpose of what he calls his poetry
being to garner him lots of sympathy.
He believes he seems braver to stand alone
without referral to canonical precedents:
these, he believes, trouble his nonce events.
He is like some river's sunkent, encrusted stone,
unaware, that above him, streams a flow or a flood;
it does not disturb him, nestled in the mud,
while bottom feeders crawl all over him,
searching for a sustenance all too slim:
he can only offer them more piss-and-moan.
Starward
