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Writing Poetry But Not The Poet
By Bruce Kramer
Sylvia Plath and T.S. Elliot are looking over my shoulder laughing
as I sink to the bottom of the Spoon River
with Dickinson chained to my ankle.
I am crucified up on the Frost.
I am not a recluse.
I am not a drug addict.
Because I am not all of
you who have come before me
I write poetry but am not a poet.
Ferlenghetti ticketed me for driving with a suspended poetic licence.
Shakespeare has blown me out of the canon.
I am not suicidal.
I am not "marginalized".
I have not been kicked out of a university.
I'm buried under your anthologized words.
I've had it with all of you.
Step aside. It's time for you to move.
Go fill up the rooms of Westminster Abbey
with your sonnets and manifestos and "thees" and "thous".
Move!
I am not a naturalist, modernist, post-modernist, feminist, realist, or
metafictionalist.
I am not a beat, lyricist, non-conformist, cavalier, transcendentalist, or
any other kind of "ist" that so many of you wear like a proud scarlett letter.
I write poetry but am not a poet.
I write but am not a writer.
If all of you will not use your words as the ladder to elevate me into the
big coffee shop in the sky, but instead use them to beat me down,
then hell with you.
Yes, even you Walt Whitman.