why not, buy a goddam big car,
drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going.
I Know a Man ― Robert Creeley (with lil’ nods to Dylan & the Creel himself)
why not, buy a goddam big car,
question for the dummies & generic Johns:
was that a real poem or did you
just make it up yourself?
drive, he sd, for
yr own caution: hair-trigger turns, small
fist of words, elliptically, on impact
… see the light come shining …
christ’s sake, look
apropos that circumstance, that
possibility, momently, like they say
any day now, a‧n‧y day now …
out where yr going.
surrender, its own unfolding
drive, he said, we know this
blessèd company of others
Copyright © Stephen Bett.
–
Stephen Bett’s father took him to sit, age 15 and starting out in poetry, at the feet of his father’s friend P.K. Page, the doyenne of Canadian poetry, who later revived the “glosa” in Canada. Bett’s new book, his 25th, in a sense brings it all back home. Broken Glosa takes the “glosa,” a Renaissance Spanish Court form, and breaks it down to its contemporary essentials―fractured forms for fractured times and alternate realities―riffing on postmodernist and post-postmodernist poets in ways that are as surprising and inventive as they are richly textured while remaining fresh and playful.
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