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What love does unto poets

isn’t tragic: it’s atrocious. A shameful
ruin strikes the poets seized by love,
which is indifferent to poetic preference or
identity. Love drives them to the absolute catastrophe
of sameness, the gay poets,
the bisexual poets, the pansexual poets,
the feminist or femi-not poets and poetresses,
the ones obsessed with gender
and the degenerates in equal measure, the polymorphously perverse:
even the ones who have a fetish for
the metric feet surrender at the soles of love,
which doesn’t care for ideology,
poetics, or curriculum. It sends the bards
of the ivory tower plunging directly
to the ground floor. It permits the apostles
of the Zeitgeist, who shamelessly proclaim that lyric poetry
is dead, to insist on the error
and on their own interminable sermons. It triggers palatal hemorrhage
in those who bend oblique, laconic maxims,
in the tin-can hermetics, in those who vacuum-pack
their verses, in falsifiers of silence,
in those who forge Spanish haiku
in the Italian mode. It chokes the sweet laments
of the purists of voice, and snaps the phalanxes
of those fanatical with rhythm, and shatters
the private metronome they carry near the heart
to set the pace of their lines. It adjusts the sensorium
of the clairvoyants and the damned and all the other
rebels and insurrectionaries with no poetic
cause or purpose, and cures them of the reasoned disarray
of all their senses. It drives from their dark night
those begging light for the poem
in the caverns of meaning and returns them directly
to the late show of the literal flesh. What love
does unto poets, with patience, with tenderness,
while butterflies languidly ulcerate their stomachs
and, little by little, the pancreas ceases to function,
is highly inconvenient. For those who seek, with a surgeon’s exactitude
and diligence, the perfect word, it wrecks
their pulse; instead of giving life, they crush it in their zeal.
And for those who, with ardor and devotion, pursue
an absolute within the poem, as if a grail
made out of light, translucent, terse, and feverish,
it clouds their certainties, and then the very desire
to quench their anxiety. What love
does unto poets, inadvertently,
while they sew and they sing and choke on quails, is sudden, terminal
and devastating. It is a crushing tide
of prose, which urges on and multiplies, in exponential increase,
the boors and the blockheads of poetry:
the ones who needlessly shorten their tiny lines,
those who compulsively enjamb them;
the typographical designers of verse,
and those who fracture syntax without knowing how
to twist it; the ones who rummage in the ether, searching out
unprecedented and inaudible neologisms; the modernists
without pretext; the ones who think the wheel
is reinvented within each stammering line;
the porno-poets and the damn-the-man poets;
the poets who drop names throughout
the forests of their poems, as Hansel and Gretel flung
breadcrusts; the ones who shape their empty voices to imitate
the gestures of lobotomized children;
the lovely, happy, fickle poets;
the urban tribes, the groupies of pubescent poems;
the popstar and the rockstar poets; videopoets and performers;
the UFO-poets, both flying and crawling, though well-identified;
objectivists sans object
and sans vista; those poets who insist that poems
should dress in rags, like beggars; the philosopher poets;
and the convinced practitioners
of “poetic prose.” For love,
which moves the sun and all the other poets,
it brings them to the final paroxysm: it turns them
to earth, to smoke, to shadow and to dust, et cetera:
to dust in love.
And it if it comes to be that still, among themselves,
the paired poets adoringly adore each other,
happy in their solar unscanned love,
as if they truly were for one another
a great black hole of nebulous opinions,
tacit pats on the back and comments made in passing,
like dwarves, cooling down, they are each absorbed into the other
and disappear.

English translations by Robin Myers