At the Bedford Church last night you read to packed pews

about lanyards and sulking teenage girls and all

the prosaic moments when incongruous juxtapositions force a laugh

opening onto a deep well of feeling.

I was enjoying it, pleasure being the first thing

required of any poet, as a great poet

once told us.

Then during the question and answer you said the Romantics

“stomped out sex and humor from poetry.”

Your listeners laughed: oh, yeah, those old farts.

We never liked them either.

 

And so, you’d looked elsewhere to find your voice.

 

Your teachers have a lot to answer for if they never introduced you

to Oothoon, La Belle Dame and Madeleine, not to mention

Nannie in her “cutty sark,” and if you want your sex and humor

mixed in epic proportions, Don Juan and his Julia, Haidee, Gulbayez—ah!

and the Ladies Adeline and Fitz-Fulke.

 

But I bet you were thinking of Wordsworth,

hogging the foreground,

blocking our view,

casting his long, grim shadow over everyone—

about as funny as a Cumbrian shepherd on a wet night

and as sexy as a pair of Wellingtons—

that uninvited guest pushing

his mad-mothers and idiot boys and leech-gatherers into view

and shouting, “These lives matter!”

when what we want is another martini,

and to get this young lady into a quiet corner of the room

for more intimate, humorous chatter.

 

One last question, before the Q & A is done:

where would Billy C. be today

if Billy W. hadn’t kicked out the jambs

and let in the language really used by men?

(How quaint it seems now, but then . . .)

or told us the best poetry was best prose,

and that the poet wrote under one restriction only,

the “necessity of producing immediate pleasure,”

even if his voice didn’t fit our measure?