Hayseed Huck
04-13-2010, 12:04 PM
The Long Beauty yacht pushes up the Saint Lawrence River
at eight p.m. and nobody cares if you got on or missed it.
The world's longest running wake just keeps going.
In a shipboard ballroom, the lucky few tend to their good
time. Clucking like a squadron of sub-Saharan bushbirds
leak MFA girls' lips-- girls who tossed their chapbooks
and poetry explicators for lathering in Valentino, Gault-
ier, and Bulgari. Defying you with their eyes, they throw
off a kind of heat that has never burned you before--
but burns you now.
Poetry is dead. Short story writing is dead.
Writers now with nothing to do-- writers with leftover
grant money and new styles hang around the edges of the
yatch with satisfied smiles, their low vibrating eyes
calm, punching through and over thousand-dollar sun-
glasses.
They like it that creative writing is dead. Truth at last ...
They will kiss you, they will ignore you-- you'll know
where you stand. Over on the riverbank, skinny fishermen
decline to wave hello as the ship glides by, its seven-foot
speakers towers blasting sonar across the whole known uni-
verse.
Creative writing is dead
Go ahead and smoke, because this is what happens when all
college writing and writing forums fell down. This is the
wake party that deals the final blow of death that died
40 years ago.
Two 20-year-old girls, refugees from Iowa University's writ-
ing seminars on poetry, girls who look 14. bump into the side
rails losing all feeling for boundaries, devouring each other
in elapsing ether. Guys who were monitors on the best poetry
forums, now out of power, can't quit bossing.
They'll crack your chest and massage your broken heart-- see
if you can keep up with the idea no one reads creative writ-
ing anymore.
Dead-- and it ain't coming back.
You could talk about it like it was a movie, and you still
wouldn't make it halfway to the truth. Poetry is all burnt
up and in the burn you can have a great time knowing it's
over and new rules are in play--
No pity-- that's one of them.
Now, it's all masculine body muscle with money that never
runs out, girls freed from having to enroll in silly $1000
writing classes, young boys freed from seeking advice on
forums.
Now, loosed, all run free with joy never runs out-- vodka
and tequila, clothes, shoes, cigars, burn-through-your-
braingirl looks. Surface peaches, tongues laden with need-
les inside the tip.
Time-- never runs out. No deadlines.
Taste never diminishes. The girls make the taste. Big full
lips. Big full eyes blackened like charcoal blackens a sheet.
Long fingers and long legs. Skirts atop needle heels or
flashing knee-high boots. Comes a waft of suspended young,
deep-maturing that lies just out of reach.
The MasterCard with Delta miles clicks along the glass table-
top. Caplets spool through the vertebrae. The lost poets
finally start to feel comfortable. It's always some equinox
here, with the glisking smoke sticking around and the speak-
er sound that just keeps blowing and everyone has something
in their mouths--
tobacco, chemical concoction, short choppy words, ice.
The girl at the side of a woman Pushcart prize winner has
diamonds in her eyes and pink gum in her mouth. You get to
watch as she tongues-slides her gum into the woman's hand.
She throws it to the deck after giving the slobbered quid
a few chews to sweeten the linger of Havana in her cigar.
Upstairs on the top deck, dancers are mixing glitter with
baby oil on their palms, polishing up their $75 tans so
that their skin will reflect the light that bounces around
the dance floor. They're stepping in and out of sheer gear,
strings and and stained pads.
It's not a tough formula-- mind yourself around the eight-
foot Candy Land platform. Poets like to touch beauty.
Tough.
Nearby a dozen MFA grads are moaning "Oh ....." but mince-
tapping in knee-high D&G boots. A waitress in a black and
orange uniform hoists a bottle of Cristal in the air, fire
spitting from white-hot sparklers in her other hand. She
pushes open the saloon doors with the porthole windows, and
the poetry party that was never necessary before begins to
singe the edges of all you can see--
then slides like a stiletto into your mind where it lurks
a tropical brain freeze.
A National Book Award winner backs into his sleeping cham-
ber a few steps down from the dance floor. His hideaway is
a white-cloud enclosure with a high-perch bed. His walls
are plasma screen and low-flying chandelier, the long dawn
sunlight fighting the curtains.
Time flakes off and falls away like that wall inside you
separating right from wrong. He wears tan slacks a silk
white shirt shirt pleated from shoulder to belt.
Thin lines of gold threads.
A Bryn Mahr grad slips drunk to her knees, lies akimbo.
You step over her. Her last words before passing out--
"Is creative writing .... really .... dead?"
HH
at eight p.m. and nobody cares if you got on or missed it.
The world's longest running wake just keeps going.
In a shipboard ballroom, the lucky few tend to their good
time. Clucking like a squadron of sub-Saharan bushbirds
leak MFA girls' lips-- girls who tossed their chapbooks
and poetry explicators for lathering in Valentino, Gault-
ier, and Bulgari. Defying you with their eyes, they throw
off a kind of heat that has never burned you before--
but burns you now.
Poetry is dead. Short story writing is dead.
Writers now with nothing to do-- writers with leftover
grant money and new styles hang around the edges of the
yatch with satisfied smiles, their low vibrating eyes
calm, punching through and over thousand-dollar sun-
glasses.
They like it that creative writing is dead. Truth at last ...
They will kiss you, they will ignore you-- you'll know
where you stand. Over on the riverbank, skinny fishermen
decline to wave hello as the ship glides by, its seven-foot
speakers towers blasting sonar across the whole known uni-
verse.
Creative writing is dead
Go ahead and smoke, because this is what happens when all
college writing and writing forums fell down. This is the
wake party that deals the final blow of death that died
40 years ago.
Two 20-year-old girls, refugees from Iowa University's writ-
ing seminars on poetry, girls who look 14. bump into the side
rails losing all feeling for boundaries, devouring each other
in elapsing ether. Guys who were monitors on the best poetry
forums, now out of power, can't quit bossing.
They'll crack your chest and massage your broken heart-- see
if you can keep up with the idea no one reads creative writ-
ing anymore.
Dead-- and it ain't coming back.
You could talk about it like it was a movie, and you still
wouldn't make it halfway to the truth. Poetry is all burnt
up and in the burn you can have a great time knowing it's
over and new rules are in play--
No pity-- that's one of them.
Now, it's all masculine body muscle with money that never
runs out, girls freed from having to enroll in silly $1000
writing classes, young boys freed from seeking advice on
forums.
Now, loosed, all run free with joy never runs out-- vodka
and tequila, clothes, shoes, cigars, burn-through-your-
braingirl looks. Surface peaches, tongues laden with need-
les inside the tip.
Time-- never runs out. No deadlines.
Taste never diminishes. The girls make the taste. Big full
lips. Big full eyes blackened like charcoal blackens a sheet.
Long fingers and long legs. Skirts atop needle heels or
flashing knee-high boots. Comes a waft of suspended young,
deep-maturing that lies just out of reach.
The MasterCard with Delta miles clicks along the glass table-
top. Caplets spool through the vertebrae. The lost poets
finally start to feel comfortable. It's always some equinox
here, with the glisking smoke sticking around and the speak-
er sound that just keeps blowing and everyone has something
in their mouths--
tobacco, chemical concoction, short choppy words, ice.
The girl at the side of a woman Pushcart prize winner has
diamonds in her eyes and pink gum in her mouth. You get to
watch as she tongues-slides her gum into the woman's hand.
She throws it to the deck after giving the slobbered quid
a few chews to sweeten the linger of Havana in her cigar.
Upstairs on the top deck, dancers are mixing glitter with
baby oil on their palms, polishing up their $75 tans so
that their skin will reflect the light that bounces around
the dance floor. They're stepping in and out of sheer gear,
strings and and stained pads.
It's not a tough formula-- mind yourself around the eight-
foot Candy Land platform. Poets like to touch beauty.
Tough.
Nearby a dozen MFA grads are moaning "Oh ....." but mince-
tapping in knee-high D&G boots. A waitress in a black and
orange uniform hoists a bottle of Cristal in the air, fire
spitting from white-hot sparklers in her other hand. She
pushes open the saloon doors with the porthole windows, and
the poetry party that was never necessary before begins to
singe the edges of all you can see--
then slides like a stiletto into your mind where it lurks
a tropical brain freeze.
A National Book Award winner backs into his sleeping cham-
ber a few steps down from the dance floor. His hideaway is
a white-cloud enclosure with a high-perch bed. His walls
are plasma screen and low-flying chandelier, the long dawn
sunlight fighting the curtains.
Time flakes off and falls away like that wall inside you
separating right from wrong. He wears tan slacks a silk
white shirt shirt pleated from shoulder to belt.
Thin lines of gold threads.
A Bryn Mahr grad slips drunk to her knees, lies akimbo.
You step over her. Her last words before passing out--
"Is creative writing .... really .... dead?"
HH