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Contests : Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest : Past Winners : 2008 : Highly Commended
ARS ANTI-POETICA/HALLOWEEN CANDY
Our New Poetry dwells in a literary Reality, both virtual and literal.
Our tribe assembles tonight for this year's Ritual.
New Verse to be our verse should be close to the ground, substantial in heavy
We are like we were last year, but we are different too.
nouns for things and in short short verbs, both nouns and verbs like dirty socks held up
Peter Pan and Hopalong are gone; but the Barbies' squeals shrill out anew,
by their own grit. Spare adjectives, thank you! Only Anglo-Saxon please.
in small voices yet unpleasant. Other Oldtimers run the course:
Offer no allusions, no phrases Latinate. Talent is unnecessary, completely accessory.
Hags, goblins, ghosts and ghouls and Frankie S, the gladsome gruesome crew.
You need only the walking-down-the-street-fall-on-your-face approach. A verity.
Vlad flits ahead, avoids the light, no u-vee for him. Skip the cappuccino—
This advice will suffice: Show what and when, not how nor why.
He prefers his brew decaffeinate; the flavor, yuppy warm, in vivo.
Let words be neatly arrayed, cleverly chosen, few—and as lean as a beggar's belly.
New gatherers mill around: astronauts, Vaders and the gladiators,
Deify Derrida. Serve sub-minimalist quanta only: less is next to Godliness.
princesses, monks, knights, fairies, GI Joes, Spocks, aliens, Barneys and Beavises.
Damn all metaphors! Outdated, pissant pedantry! Slant all rhymes! Avoid alliteration.
No costumes for the Large Ones, no cowboy hats, not one light saber.
Savory syllables, singing vowels, languorous sibilance, as necessary to the art of Homer
Once of us, They have lost the love of the lure. Ay, both we and the lure have changed.
as applesauce to ironmongery, as chastity to the continuity of the species.
Before we were bound, we were pure and elemental spirits, so offerings to us
Meaning is beyond us. Symbology! Cosmology!—Mere baubles! Follies!
were song, honey, maize and hyssop from heart, glade, field and garden.
Scorn eloquence. But, if inadvertently expressed, fear not, it can be overcome in revision.
Recent offerings drop from machines: chocolates, gum and candy corn.
Dismember meter. Defeat the beat. Dispense with pleasure domes, sacred rivers
Tonight, dollops wrapped in plastic, untouched by caring hands, overflow.
measureless to man, and all remembrances of Xanadu. It-edness is all we know
Later, at the mall, the Large Ones will X-ray our booty, separate the tribute, the true
of poem and all we hope to know. Forget flowers, intimations of immortality, love,
from the false: our sustenance from angel dust, Ex-Lax pills, rat poison and razor blades.
odes to beauty, the hopeless quests of heroes and the wondrous names of God.
Of course, They can tell the difference—and will give us what we need.
This poem won a Highly Commended award in the 2008 Tom Howard/John H. Reid Poetry Contest sponsored by Tom Howard Books. Author Louis Girón received a $100 award. Winning Writers assists this contest. Copyright is reserved to the author.
About Louis Girón
I live in Kansas City where, in late hours of the night and early hours of the morning, I write poetry and read literary criticism. This counterpoint for two voices was fun to write; my cackling, however grating, is also a sincere plea that, in our rush to embrace the new, the outré, the clever and the trendy, poets not discard the old, the beautiful, the sonorous or the elegant. My poems have been rejected by the finest literary magazines in this country. My poetry has appeared in Revue (Kansas City), Sunflower Petals, Del Sol Review, Perihelion and The Potomac as well as in Winning Writers
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