Talking with the Barista about Poets

Verble: OK, so you were asking me about the poets that were told in that poem that he recited at table 3 the other day, well, I downloaded some photos and I thought I'd give you a quick rundown, here we go:

e.e. cummings, the best poet of the twentieth century, and perhaps the greatest poet in the English language . . . oh heck, he's just the best poet EVER! even if he does bear more than a passing resemblance to Pablo Picasso.

Emily Dickenson. Boy, I can't even begin to describe the loathing I have for her poetry, but then, just look at her! Think Tuesday Addams on major hallucinogens! This ain't no Cullen vampire, let me tellya! This woman would suck the lifeblood out of you as soon as look at you. And all this talk about her poems being avant garde, ahead of her time - BAH! Basically, she couldn't focus on working a coherent thought, she was so stoned! It wasn't a "new" rhythm, then pen just kept jumping out of her hand. Acid freak!

The Beat Generation, hm. They wrote poetry off the cuff to the rhythm of free form American jazz - they were hippies who still took baths and haircuts. They dressed like itinerant Mexican farmworkers but still looked like a Mississippi lynch mob!

Good ol' Thomas Stearns, the man who wrote the absolute worst three lines in the history of poetry, "Let us go then, you and I/when evening is spread against the sky/like a patient etherized upon a table!" Agh! Gives me conniption fits every time I think about it! and what's the worst thing is I can't get it out of my head!




And his cohort, Ezra Pound, was almost as bad in his pomposity and complete use of esoteric allusions to ancient mythological dieties, and we're not talking the usual ones, we're talking the ones that only show up in the corners of the stories, and to top off the arrogance, he used to switch languages in the middle of a poem - I read one once where he switched languages FIVE TIMES in one poem - now listen, I can understand when there's a phrase or two in one languages that simply can't translate, and needs to be inserted in the poem, and I can even see when going back and forth between languages in one poem really gives the effect of being a part of both of those worlds, but FIVE languages! That's just showing off!

And I never understood what happened to Pound physically anyway, as you can see, when he was young he looked like Courbet or any of those other French Bohemian painters, and when he got old he just looked like Charles Bukowski. Ouch!