TO JOHN BERRYMAN
          BY JEFF STEEN
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JEFF STEEN is currently Associate Editor for DiningOut magazine in Denver, Colo. This is his first journal publication, though he has published extensively in food, culture, and entertainment magazines, as well as in regional newspapers across the U.S. He is currently working towards a PhD in theology with a concentration in inter-religious dialogue.

jeff.steen AT gmail DOT com

© 2008 Jeff Steen
COMMAS WHERE THEY SHOULDN'T, by and prepositions floating ideas lost and Sunday adjectives at work on Wednesdays? Stupid dilettante; stupi dscholar who cannot but rebut with course conceptions: tell me, bastard with a bachelor's! but still there are some, who say: show me, softly, and off to work they go.

You damned idiots can drink your hollow liquor of books the same, the poetry that runs the same, da vinci's eight-limbed freak. Berryman has found it! you cry, the elevated angst of old school penners rusty suddenly, empty of ideas just the same, and you enunciate the gross intention of every artist with a drafty ream: the long long poem.

Don't be long, be short and too th epoint, be quick and quizzical by being ordinary! The Hell you mean, you stalwart principals of post-modernity?! I wrote you poems once, you looked at them and said to me: practice with a day behind you. Too young, perhaps, the grim-faced, over-bearded, jaded butchers with a several-dulled instrument. And when I called them on the point, they waddled out the door, their poetry streaming cans behind ...

I am in love with some of them, the ones long dead and buried, the dusty rivets in that bookcase on display. some ask me: read it, may I? and knowing them as lovers too, I often nod. But they read lines, LINES, and tap it back to place. Brilliant! over one word wizardry, and that's a breath.

But I have brewed with stanzas, cantos, reams of mistaken language plied. Do you think it slick, or have you wondered, that the stream of consciousness lies where subtle-knowing, truth-confounded twitterpats have said "Poetry now!" Shit—it is cancerous at best.

Defy your teams that mush through pretty painted snow; I'll do it just the same, if you bow down and low i'll rise, beyond the final shelf. Oh God will look at me and jog elastic memory to think of when he said "It's so," and I upset the cumbersome new rite of poetry unfurled like a bannered cross. But sure enough, stranded as I do, milk the high and crush the far beneath I do, I'll live in old romantic worlds time a-by, tomorrow reek of negligence and suicide for no apparent reason than the cookies burned, and years with canes that totter on from now, the coma stirs and some unfeeling Phelp replies between his corrugated cars, the teeth:

Ah! I see! You sick, long-winded welps! he cries because I haven't said at all? but told, but shown, but nott at once and Sundays. David, have you many clothes on your 411th birthday?



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