The Great Debate, Continued

                           This is the time

                           of the tragic man

You wrote out of key so long

you forgot what art was,

what moves men is not their hate

but pain splashed with love.

All my life, I believed

I knew nothing. And so...

Seized by need to see the free

exchange of tactics

you severed from the rules,

leapt across the trickling stream

All my life, I believed

I knew nothing. And so...

emptied the balky ear

of dialogue,

became the goat scraping

the s**t from the black black shoe

All my life, I believed

I knew nothing. And so...

always between Scylla and Charybdis,

beset by the narrow waters;

what's new but ancient,

how to re-build what needed tearing down?

All my life, I believed

I knew nothing. And so...

The age you demanded

you could never command,

the old w****s couldn't continence

the new tricks you desired

All my life, I believed

I knew nothing. And so...

the obscure reveries,

mystic gymnastics

sculpture of rhyme

that never rhymed

All my life, I believed

I knew nothing. And so...

marked you as the pariah,

save the few friends

ever in awe of the sharp eye's

rapier glint's gleam for a line.

All my life, I believed

I knew nothing. And so...

Ken e Bujold

© 2022

Author's Note

The opening epigraph is from Elizabeth Bishop's "The Visits to St. Elizabeth's" her poem about visiting EP while he was confined to the asylum following WW II. The italics repeating refrain is EP's own words from a 1963 interview given to Grazia Levi. The verses are Eliotesque riff on TS critiquing the first 5 verses of Pound's major work "Hugh Selwyn Mauberley."
Ken e