Why the Poet Always Reads First and the Fiction Writer Second
at the Saturday Afternoon Readings at the Art School in Carrboro, NC.
The reason is that poetry was present
at the poorly advertized
first audition of the universe
……. when a slight breath of cloud
……..passed over the dark waters
poetry was in fact that cloud
……..which passed effortlessly
……..through God’s ears
while the ancestors of fiction writers
took tenthousand centuries
to evolve
……..toiling sideways in the primal mud
……..on their miniscule legs, gossiping
……..intensely of their plots and
……..subplots
because poetry came out of the tree
like a bird
……..without a nest
because poetry is so close to dance
and therefore swirls and twists even
……..if ever so slightly
……..and allied as well to the music of flutes
……..and drums recalling certain rituals
for example — two people, a man and a woman,
howling, alternately, in the dark cave
because poetry came out of the tree
very slowly
……..and then darted right back into it
because the students of ontology
and deontology continue to bow
their heads in disbelief and
cannot make up their minds what
……..sort of universe this is
……..but meantime the rock can skip
….across the waters
….and the sea mammal can rise
out of the deep, snorting and braying,
and so God is probably
….a poem, still in the process
….of composition by an undeniably talented
but distracted surrealist who was there
….in the Garden of Eden and
….whispered to Adam: “Isn’t that a mango?”
because in the pitch dark
….I take off my clothes and stand
in the not-so-sacred woods bathing in
moonlight waiting for you
…perfectly sober, perfectly aware
that what I do
…. is destined by the chains of protein
rattling in my cells
and I am locked to the wall of my being
….noisy with pleasure, waiting
to be extinguished
the reason is that this arrangement is
practical, the poet has to leave earlier.
….he has fewer words but those few
….are strangely heavy. so he will unwrap
them a little, let them cry out like an infant
whose discontent
….we cannot figure out. all we know is
sooner or later
….it will sleep
because there is the missing nest,
the bird, the puddle in the rain
….and the branch vibrating with
what is about or not yet about
….to exist.
by Lou Lipsitz
from Seeking the Hook
Signal Books, 1997