LawrenceOn two occasions in the past twelve months,
I have failed, when someone at a party
spoke of him with a dismissive scorn,
to stand up for D.H. Lawrence,
a man who burned like an acetylene torch
from one end to the other of his life.
These individuals, whose relationship to literature
is approximately that of a tree shredder
to stands of old-growth forest,
these people leaned back in their chairs,
bellies full of dry white wine and the ova of some foreign fish,
and casually dropped his name
the way that pygmies with their little poison spears
strut around the carcass of a fallen elephant.
"O Elephant," they say,
"you are not so big and brave today!"
It's a bad day when people speak of their superiors
with a contempt they haven't earned,
and it's a sorry thing when certain other people
don't defend the great dead ones
who have opened up the world before them.
And though, in the catalogue of my betrayals,
this is a fairly minor entry,
I resolve, if the occasion should recur,
to uncheck my tongue and say, "I love the spectacle
of maggots condescending to a corpse."
or "You should be so lucky in your brainy, bloodless life
as to deserve to lift
just one of D.H.Lawrence's urine samples
to your arid pychobiographic
theory-tainted lips."
Or maybe I'll just take the shortcut
between the spirit and the flesh,
and punch someone in the face,
because human beings haven't come that far
in their effort to subdue the body,
and we still walk around like zombies
in our dying, burning world,
able to do little more
than fight, and fuck, and crow:
something Lawrence wrote about
in such a manner
as to make us seem magnificent.
Tony Hoagland****************
RL
If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...
if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul
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