I love Sue Savoy. Though not has well known outside of Cambridge, her work was already the stuff of wild applause when I first went to the Cantab and she walked onstage to over a decade ago. It still is. I even helped to publish her recently. Some people don't get her style, but I do. It can be very liberating. Hence the poem below.
Bad Legacy
Written in Tribute to The Voice of Sue Savoy
I once heard someone say
or quote someone who said it
that poetry is not just poems
it's also doing anything
really well like your job
or cleaning your house.
I think that's just crap
other writers tell you
to get you to stop writing.
Last week I cleaned a kitchen
did a pretty good job too
even steam cleaned the floor.
It got undone in a day
some of it with my help
more dishes in the sink
than the dishwasher.
I guess people don't like
that kind of poem I do either.
I suppose I'd better find
something I do real well.
When you're older, people stop
giving you points for trying anything
They tell you get it right or leave
and less and less of them
care about your poems.
At this rate when I die
I'll go up and ask to meet Apollo
or Dionysus or whomever
and they'll ask me what I did
for poetry.
I'll have to tell them something like
"I took picture of people's retinas
for a few decades. I guess I did it
very well, though no one,
not even the doctors after a wile
really looked at them.
The the poetry gatekeeper will say,
"Well, that sounds pretty damn stupid.
Of course you're not going to be
honored as a poet. The good news
is you get to go to Heaven
because no poet ever does
for spending their whole life writing poems."
And that will make feel better.
Almost.
No comments:
Post a Comment