Last night’s winners, at the Poetry Project Marathon, were, to my mind:

Merry Fortune

Ted Greenwald

Taylor Mead

I missed a lot of readers because I was working the refreshment table, fetching bowls of chili and counting out change from the cash boxes. For some reason not entirely clear to me, I enjoyed these tasks immensely.

Gary and I have collaborated for four marathons in a row now. We usually take it upon ourselves to rewrite something. In the first year we each did a version of Yeats’ “The Second Coming”. Mine was pornographic (It appears in _Are Not Our Lowing Heifers Sleeker than Night-Swollen Mushrooms?_. The second year we rewrote choice sections from the Book of Revelation (This one’s in _V. Imp._). Last year we wrote a play composed entirely of palindromes (“AIBOPHOBIA” — which is a palindrome meaning “fear of palindromes!) This year we rewrote Matthew Arnold’s _Dover Beach_; we thought it appropriate to our historical moment. POEM FOLLOWS:

OVER REACH

The sea is brown and sticky tonight, like a stick —

The tide is full as a gray broccoli, hunched up like a porno queen,

the moon lies fair and dripping corrosion

Upon the straits; on the French toast the margarine

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, like a giant tranquilizer.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

It also drips corrosion.

It fans across black as a hand (like a sassy cloud

in the ghetto of the sky), its spires an undersea

turkey with tendrils. Each tendril like

A baby giraffe stumbling forth to balance soup on head.

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-bland land,

Listen! Quote: the only sites under consideration for either

interim or permanent storage of high level nuclear waste

are sites on Indian land unquote.

You hear the grating roar

Of pebbles and bam-bam

which the waves draw back, and fling, like boogers,

At their return, up the high strand,

haunts in the horn, and vatic compulsions

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

1-800-innocent

1-800-amygdala

1-800-prosody

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

1-800-end pain

1-800-bankrupt

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Agean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human poetry; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea,

where everyone’s head’s a peppercorn,

bursting into flavor

at the moment of destruction.

I made of my song a coffee to go,

Black as the The Sea of Faith

or The Sea of Hype

or The Sea of Banner Advertising: quote Qualmish Afghan Jew

packed over sixty fez with bees unquote

at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright pantygirdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar:

Good evening ladies and gentlemen,

My name is sunny pain.

I’m homeless, and I’m hungry.

If you don’t have it,

I can understand it cuz I don’t have it.

My name is Sunny Pain.

As Cassavettes sez: Beware carefree braggarts’ abstract verses!

Retreating, the breath like an error message

Of the night wind, down the vast message forum

fuck you very efficient missile defense system mandatory suicide?

And in the naked shingles of the world,

everything’s going to be … what it is… in the nervous movie of now.

Ah, love, if we cannot be true

To one another, let us yip unholy in oily kimono, pull kinky polyphony

& minimum punk in my nylon mink muumu

for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams, with corn! and frogponds! and air traffic cravings!

So various, so beautiful, so new — the anorexic bunnies and their hot flashes —

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light (as seen on TV),

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Tiptoeing over the hardboiled eggs,

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by the light

of the CNN cameras.