Showing posts with label James Tate. Show all posts
Showing posts with label James Tate. Show all posts

Friday, September 17, 2021

The sad truth haiku

Can’t bring myself to
read poems that are longer
than ten lines or so.

– Leonard Blumfeld (© 2021)

Notes
First of all – why should this truth be sad? Only for myself, I must admit. Others may concur, disagree or simply don’t give a flying fog. It’s a free world, peotry included. (Think I just created a word! Peotry ... like poetry mixed with peyote.) Anyway, all rubbish. What brought about this rubbish? I was looking for enjoyable poetry in the famous Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry (famous because – at least in my days at the university – it was a standard book to carry around for English and Creative Writing courses). I started at the back of the hefty volume, thinking those poems had to be by the most modern and least stuffy poets. I believe in brevity in general, so I was really looking for something short, but nothing doing! Even James Tate’s “The Blue Booby”, which starts at the bottom of page 1387 with 3 promising ultra-short lines but rolls on for most of the next page, ending with “like the eyes of a mild savior” – a line I actually like. It really packs a punch. If only there weren’t so much in between. Well, pardon me, it’s the old grouch speaking again, having accrued more than 10 lines of negatively ranty prose by now. I know for a fact that long poems exist. I even know one person personally who wrote a long poem (thankfully it was still in the making when I knew her) and said she loved long poems! The sad truth actually is that people who like poems (period!) are a very, very tiny minority.