Well Bottom Blues

without a net…

This was originally written in verse as an appendix to a resignation letter to the MFA program I’ve dropped out of mostly because I can’t afford it but also because of  subtle but pervasive age incrimination

An ancient whale washed up on Lakeshore Drive with barnacles as old as the the University’s mid-century Liberal Arts Building, a scene as strange  as Fellini’s beached sea monster in La Dolce Vita. Perhaps I should make the whale white, a reference more obvious than last century’s black-and-white masterpiece but color references have grown fraught. Why is it white? Why is Queequeg portrayed so strange? All fair questions that miss the entire point.

I tried a Miltonic Old Testament narrative in a blank verse assignment, pondering the selection of one nomadic tribe over all the Ziggurat and irrigation savvy peoples but no one identified the Israelites. One thought it science fiction.

My education involved card catalogs and the Readers Guide to Periodical Literature. (Google it.) My assigned reading was as white and phallic as the night-lit Parthenon. I felt like an exchange student from the The New Criticism but I came of age in the early 70s. Howl loomed as large as Whitman in that world. There were two Dylan’s in my pantheon. I helped seed the current rebellion and wowed at the Superbowl shout-out to Gil Scott-Heron.

Allusion is a fun house mirror maze in this new age. My grandfather’s clock goes tick tock, not Tik Tok. No matter I was on the Internet before most of my classmates were born. Then it was a text, the amber candle flicker of the new Gutenberg. I have just enough of the 20th Century,  English-translation version of a 19th Century education required to make The Cantos intelligible even with Terrill’s Companion.

I am grateful to my professors and classmates. You helped launch me to a new level. I just can’t afford it, and yes at times it was an uncomfortable fit.

I am shot out of The Canon:  that old, discarded circus trick in an age in which the extravagantly tattooed and bearded sit comfortably in every coffee shop, not hidden in a carney tent. The clown trombones now whah whah for my Classical faux pas. I am as antique as a bank paper, leatherette Norton Anthology and as out of date. My brass corner pieces are tarnished  with neglect. Still I persist as poet after my own fashion like Tennyson’s aging Ulysses: “That which we are, we are.”