Thanks for firing this one up, Michael.
Every poet I know loves to roll their eyes at the whole navel-gazing concept of "poems about poetry." But I have yet to meet a poet who can resist writing one from time to time.
Here's a short one of mine.
Keeping It Real
Bullet wound is concrete, mortality abstract;
The latter’s a cool concept, the former a hot fact.
Love is an abstraction, orgasm concrete;
Only one is salty (although either can be sweet).
And here's a longer one that appeared in Big City Lit, a response poem to an anti-slam essay that I though was pretty clueless. The author had cast himself as a champion of the Western canon, standing strong against barbarians the gates, so it gave me great pleasure to go all Alexander Pope on his ass, by which I mean make fun of him in heroic couplets.
To a Defender of Poetic Tradition
You know how people look like fools when they
Dis formal verse as fusty and passé?
When they call meter a straitjacket, rhyme
A lifeless fossil from a bygone time?
Well, that’s how foolish you look when you damn
With cognate cluelessness the sins of slam.
You say slam poets seem to prize cheap thrills
And edgy topics more than verbal skills.
You grumble that they’re all pierced, tattooed,
Unversed in subtle wordplay, “urban,” crude.
Their hip-hop histrionics on the stage,
You sneer, can’t match your deep thoughts on the page.
Thank God your coded ethnic slurs aren’t cheap,
And your disdain for skin art is so deep.
The way you pierce the surface, plumb the core,
When you anatomize what you abhor
Saves you from sounding like some shallow jerk
With his head jammed up his collected work.
Are there particular slam poems you hate?
I might agree. I wouldn’t hesitate
To say some slammers suck, if you’ll admit
Page poets, too, sometimes write dreadful shit.
There’s good work in both camps, and both include
Some poems as lousy as your attitude.
It’s generally unwise to generalize
About whole genres when you criticize.
Keep it specific; broad-brush imprecision
Makes you an easy target for derision.
Slammers, you charge, talk dirty. Which is true.
But so did Shakespeare. So do I. Fuck you.
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