Silly Goofball Poets

Taking a Kerouac idea out for a spin with his peers.

I always hated Yeats.
Marianne Moore writes poems I like.
Langston Hughes was so full of soul, he burst,
and is bursting still.
Cummings has parentheses for eyebrows.
Sylvia Plath was the best sand castle ever.
Dickinson can see you from her window.
Gerard Manley Hopkins used all his names!
Walt Whitman is a mirror that only reflects himself.
Stevenson had a childhood made of paper.
Auden's face looks like it came ashore after many years of being rolled by the sea.
Takahashi walked into the sea calmly.
John Milton makes me sleepy.
Ferlinghetti was incompatible with underwear.
Ezra Pound wrote haiku and never told.
John Donne raves on.
Elizabeth Bishop is a mossy tree.
Ambrose Bierce is Swift.
Blake is Blake.
Kerouac is.
Basho.
Roethke is a cross between Thurber and a shadow.
Shakespeare is a great cathedral, next to a bordello.
William Carlos Williams is outside, near the thresher.
Wallace Stevens has seen many blackbirds.
Wordsworth is too much with us.
Frost heated his house with snow.
Wendy Cope misses her cat, I think.
Issa wandered from tub to tub.
Robert Burns explored a drunken tao.
Jean Toomer's hands are dry with dirt.
Poe's hands are bloody.
Lord Byron was simply never drunk enough for this poem.
Marlowe is a ghost.
Gary Snyder's motorcycle still waits, in New Mexico.  Tracks approach it, and fall away.
Brautigan approaches it, and leaves a note.
Percy Shelley thought himself Romulus.
Lewis Carroll hove scurtly glabes.
Randall Jarrell washed out the plane.
Dante knows nothing of Hell.
Gwendolyn Brooks is real cool.
Eliot strolls.
Longfellow rolls.
Coleridge rolls on and on.

Reviews

[A.M. Nelson]

i found it kind of boring after the first few lines....and thus gave up and decided to tell you that this whole thing makes you sound rather conceited and that's only because it became apparent after the first few that maybe i am not as well read as you or as versed in the ongoing fountain of knowledge that is Wikepedia.

obviously Kerouac wasn't very talented or maybe just dried up at this point and needs new underwear. the idea, however, (and this is my real point) is merely a way of saying things in a cool way and thus shirks off any "poetic" semblance or form that it might otherwise contain if more creatively adopted.

[W.k.kortas]

By and large, I have to agree with Mr. Nelson. It's a somewhat washed-out version of Monty Python's Philosopher Song.

[Brittany]

I agree to an extent.

I find most your observations are mine as well. And damn A.M. for slandering Kerouac...Probably never read "Desolation Angels"...(best one in my opinion) E.E. Cummings was a pioneer, and I love him for it. Milton Does make me sleepy, and Blake wouldn't be Blake, if it weren't for his talented hand at painting.

All in all, I liked this one. It's not comformed to the "standards" of "properly" constructed poetry and I praise you for it.

[A.M. Nelson]

its like reading "suburbia" where only the numbers on the letterboxes change.

[Yes]

It's unique how you used all the poet's names in your poem. I find it to be an original and refreshing idea.