A poem

I'm going to post poems on a regular basis this coming year. And though explaining poems goes against many critical grains, I will most times at least give a little background about the poem.

This poem is about aging and poetry anthologies. I have dozens and dozens of them, as most of you probably do, too. And the ones with pictures of the authors from 30+ years ago show young writers who have grown old, since we can look up current pictures on the internet. Sometimes, the poets have aged gracefully. Others are paying for all that "romantic" smoking, drinking, and drug use from many years ago.

But what really interests me is that most of their poetry doesn't age at all. Or perhaps I should it doesn't age to me. For a long time, I felt the poetry of someone like Allen Ginsberg aged badly, but lately I'm not so sure. I do think his "first thought, best thought" idea for writing poetry was much of the time an excuse for laziness. At the same time, I have always been amused by poets who claimed to have worked on a specific poem for 20 or 30 years.

In short, we are trying to write poems through the lens of who we are--what we know, what we love, and, yes, what we look like. There's no other way.

So with all that in mind, here's a poem for today:

Settling for the Anthology

The desirable women who wrote poems

Selected for The Best American Poetry 1994

Have grown old on my shelf. Their breasts

Sag, they scratch graying hair in the grocery,

Take out the book to prove to themselves

They were once anthologized. The men, too,

Have grown on, truculent maybe, a little

Ridiculous, trying to book readings at small

And smaller colleges, mostly commuter schools

Now, and they pretend they can still drink,

Are still desirable to young girls, when they

Know too well the fatly shuffling figure they see

In the plate glass is the poet himself. And so

It goes on, one succession in the natural world

Replacing another, the new poets emitting

The aroma of sex and drunken desires while

The ones who age shop at Wal-Mart for images

Of one thing that reminds them of something else.

Those who believe in the poetry of aging

Have not aged. Those who believe in the poetry

Of youth have forgotten it. In the small streams,

Freshwater mussels stay clamped shut as

Storms come, rushing them from one stone

To another, a place to lodge, a code to crack.