Well Bottom Blues

One woman wrote, “I am afraid that what I want to say will not be important enough.”
on reading this statement, another student remarked: “You should drop that part. we’re really beyond that.”

“Notes re: Echo,” Sept. 8, strophe 3
Kathleen Fraser

The books I brought to the beach: Epic
Postmodernism an Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries. Ed. Reginald Shroerd and Selected Poems.  Charles Olson (Ed. Robert Creeley). I thought after this semester at the UNO Creative Writing Workshop it’s time to pound the last of the balladesque stanzas out of the old ketchup bottle.

And wrote the below:

(No reference to sitting nekid in the woods with Robert Bly smeared with bare grease against the mosquitoes intended)

Become The Drum

to move beyond       tribal accentual
antiquated clockwork Greco-metrics
the sublime bell chime of rhyme

toward the
shamanistic other
both out and inward
into vision
the hypnotic rhythm
of an older tradition
beaten on the heart

there is a primordial order
transcendent of languages
that lives in the skin that becomes the drum

remember the leather- bound father
calling the children west
celebration of the lizard
decode his madness to rediscover Dionysus

voyager out of order
record your explorations
in crow foot script
inked in mushroom
illuminated manuscript
of skin, wind worked
and sun tough
sigil of a new
vocabulary
of poetry.