poem for after the spring equinox 2025

The Grand Minima

(7 x 6)

for William Empson

Totting it up a plethora of minuscule

debris fields, eon by inch,

the daily granular fractures,

chipped bits and bobs,

dust bunnies that don’t ever quit,

the towering trivial pizza box

style of personal architecture –

love lies, business crops wilt, soar,

the whole a broken abacus possessed

by a stammering Ouija board

whose misspelt detritus inspires

poetry in the super-rich or bored,

the rising tide lifts all quotes, all toffs

step off yachts to sleep between sheets

when the port appears like a murdered

ghost – we host what we love most,

we live in a blackhole inside a blackhole,

like mice are denizens of a tinier Manhattan

project, the nuclearism is unclear, but here

it goes, small into smaller, like faller into fall or

inside the deep dive is the pool looping

around its Ouroboros dream of self –

we’re colliding with the sun that grows us,

as dancers swoon by starlight to the violins

that thrill with their spheres – musical

dividends, paying down, paying off,

jots and crosses, forgotten knots,

those broken rubber bands

good for nothing but snaking

about the lone chopstick, pennies

from Victor Von Doom’s homeland,

the whirligig pirouettes until it stops,

and we, who once were real, are legends

now for agents, booklet faces

left folded on the pews after the mourning,

some anecdotes might-as-well-be

Medieval, or, molecular iotas,

light liquified into cold solids, crazy

salad days browning definitively…

the rays that once were high as corn

now slowing down, so the small ice age

will waltz with rivers, on the planetary stage.

March 21, 2025

Comments

IQ AND THE POETS - ARE YOU SMART?

When you open your mouth to speak, are you smart? A funny question from a great song, but also, a good one, when it comes to poets, and poetry. We tend to have a very ambiguous view of intelligence in poetry, one that I'd say is dysfunctional. Basically, it goes like this: once you are safely dead, it no longer matters how smart you were. For instance, Auden was smarter than Yeats , but most would still say Yeats is the finer poet; Eliot is clearly highly intelligent, but how much of Larkin 's work required a high IQ? Meanwhile, poets while alive tend to be celebrated if they are deemed intelligent: Anne Carson, Geoffrey Hill , and Jorie Graham , are all, clearly, very intelligent people, aside from their work as poets. But who reads Marianne Moore now, or Robert Lowell , smart poets? Or, Pound ? How smart could Pound be with his madcap views? Less intelligent poets are often more popular. John Betjeman was not a very smart poet, per se....

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"I have crossed oceans of time to find you..."

In terms of great films about, and of, love, we have Vertigo, In The Mood for Love , and Casablanca , Doctor Zhivago , An Officer and a Gentleman , at the apex; as well as odder, more troubling versions, such as Sophie's Choice and Silence of the Lambs . I think my favourite remains Bram Stoker's Dracula , with the great immortal line "I have crossed oceans of time to find you...".

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