THE POET DULY TAKES NOTE OF HIS CRITICS by Joseph S. Salemi
Sunday, June 22 2008 @ 07:28 AM CDT
THE POET DULY TAKES NOTE OF HIS CRITICS
Et m’écrie avec joie: un ennemi de plus!
—Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac
We do not like Salemi. He’s the sort
Who wreaks pure havoc everywhere he goes.
He thinks that poetry’s a damned blood sport
With horses, hounds, and gamebirds hung in rows.
He cannot write without a razor’s slash;
His pen spits venom, lunar caustic, bile—
There’s nothing he won’t satirize or trash,
Ebulliently guffawing all the while.
He shows no common courtesy, no sense
That other people have something to say—
His bigotries are blatant, callous, dense;
He likes to puncture, poleaxe, butcher, flay.
He cynically fails to comprehend
That poets have a mission in this life:
They all must work to bring about the end
Of ignorance and prejudice and strife.
Where is his faith in forward-looking hopes?
When will he ever speak of natural bliss?
Why does his syntax twist like knotted ropes
Around words that the O.E.D. would miss?
He revels in forms intricate and closed;
His diction is mere erudite display—
His meters are too perfectly composed,
Just like a bonbonnière from Fabergé.
He treats the English language with respect
That wasn’t given to the Holy Grail.
But then again, what else would you expect?
He’s bourgeois, right-wing, Roman Catholic, male…
He cultivates no patrons, seldom reads,
He will not smile and spout the latest cant,
He’s deaf to sensitivities and needs—
He certainly won’t ever get a grant.
—Joseph S. Salemi
Joseph S. Salemi has published poems, translations, and scholarly articles in over one hundred journals throughout the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. His four collections of poetry are Formal Complaints and Nonsense Couplets, issued by Somers Rocks Press, Masquerade from Pivot Press, and The Lilacs on Good Friday from The New Formalist Press.
He has translated poems from a wide range of Greek and Roman authors, including Catullus, Martial, Juvenal, Horace, Propertius, Ausonius, Theognis, and Philodemus. In addition, he has published extensive translations, with scholarly commentary and annotations, from Renaissance texts such as the Faunus poems of Pietro Bembo, the Facetiae of Poggio Bracciolini, and the Latin verse of Castiglione. He is a recipient of a Herbert Musurillo Scholarship, a Lane Cooper Fellowship, an N.E.H. Fellowship, and the 1993 Classical and Modern Literature Award. He is also a four-time finalist for the Howard Nemerov Prize.
The Formalist Portal
http://theformalist.org/article.php/20080622072842448