Poetry Slam

Or, The Decline of American Verse

Four Sonnets on reading Mark Edmundson's essay by lamplight in the neotropical night

I

This iThing world we live in is just magic

I hear Ellington indelibly key Switchblade

Battery powered for me in the neotropics

Tell me you wouldn’t do it too—a rainforest language

In a mended hammock

Mildewed with cotton rot—a jar of Abuelo

Kerosene lamplight, mosquitoes and chitras

Last months Harper’s by international post

Ngäbere for red is tain and drune is for black

But the Ngäbe word for blue is blure

A cognate of a morpho’s wing’s back

Even Homer preferred wine dark I’m told

The color of the sea before indigo

A half pound red pargo fried fresh—a gift fish

Shared with adolescents on white plastic dishes

II

They gave me apple confetti; three small picante

Mingus plucks Backward Country Boy Blues

We’re all pretty much made of cornflakes

Wrote Stacy, backstay of my MFA

Strolling on the spindrift, what she had to say:

He gave me my life! (of Michael Palmer)

The Cheerleader’s Guide to the World

Was written one summer in the Caribbean

and I love the shape of a poem on the page

But at her young age how many grapefruit sized

Tumors could they expect to pull from her pelvis?

Oh, she told me she was ready

An embarrassment of riches, really

But regretted leaving her two babies

Aged only four and three

III

She said we were poets, we couldn’t help but live

Passionately—so let the reader concur or not

I threw in the whole goddamn lot

Moved to Panama—a slower way of life

Bought a dugout and met my future wife

Drank boxed wine on Sam’s dime

Helped a village build an aqueduct

Without electricity or excavators or literacy

But I stopped sending postcards once she died

How gutted I’d been

When she sat up in bed and said

Oh, I’m so sorry

There’s just so much blood

IV

Stacy, I miss your book being here

I’ve sent it back with my love to Brooklyn

Mainstream internet wifi buya

Where are the poets now who have such hunger?

Let me think Professor Edmundson

Let me finish digesting your essay

Let me pour myself another glass

Now that my pull has died: no union card for me

Which, on some level, is what might’ve mattered

But I also get what you’re really swinging to say:

She saw into the life of her own being

Adorned nature with the new thing

Poets are the legislators of this place

And Yes, We’re pretty much made of cornflakes.