Poetry about Poetry ... original or previously published poetry, December 2000

Closure 0

The galling 1, gowned Emperors 2 of Lit Crit
Herd classed 3 canonfodder 4 by degrees o'er
Exam pass to pastures new; infinite
Borderless text 5, Bakhtin 6 to no corner.
Unchained from life's Vortex through Derrida 7
To hors-texte 8, transparent, once unequalled 9
Language rings false, peels from the coarse 10 reader,
Exploits forms written off 11, discontented 12.
Racked by shopped prose 13, they plot authors' brutal
Deaths 14, yet despite these headlined, unread 15 crimes
Informers 16 live off the logocentric 17.
Discounted verse sells out 18, its capital
Ist craftsmanship 19 penned in 20 by the right 21 rhymes
Taut 22 with feeling, on the left a cross/tick 23.
Tim Love

Notes

0. "Closure" is the technical term for how a piece of literature is finished off. Whodunnits have strong closure, for example.
1. Pun on "Gaulling" (Frenchifying - the theoreticians tend to be french and impose french terminology).
2. Emperors of ice-cream (Wallace Stevens), as well as those with new (academic) clothes
3. "classed" in a teaching and sociological sense
4. "The canon" is the established set of classics that the students are fed.
5. A quote from Barthes, who thought that texts depended so much on each other that the world's literature formed a network. A text is just a door into this network and thus is without borders, infinite.
6. Influential Russian theorist
7. Famous French theorist
8. Derrida said that there was no "hors-texte" - nothing exists beyond text.
9. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets deny poetry its denotative qualities - for them language is opaque.
10. Pun on "course".
11. "written off" can mean "given no chance"
12. "discontented" can mean "voided of content"
13. Pun on "racked". Double meaning on "shopped"
14. Barthes famously talked of the death of the author. A text is a product of society and genre, not of one individual
15. "unread" = "unbloody"
16. "Informers" continues the criminal thread but could also mean those who write in forms and make their living from words.
17. "logocentricity" is a term used by Derrida.
18. "sells out" has a double meaning.
19. Craftsmanship is considered capitalist, elitist. The "capital\ 1st" could be read as "the capital first" (the first letter of each line's a capital).
20. "penned in" has a double meaning.
21. Double meaning in "right"
22. Pun on "taut".
23. An acrostic. The poem is bordered on all sides!
Tim Love
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