Poets

The first animals with backbones were poets. They were a great success. There are still thousands and thousands of kinds of poets. The poets of our rivers and lakes and seas furnish poetry for billions of people.

Some poets live all their lives in fresh water. They live in ponds and
lakes and streams. Basho and Issa are fresh-water poets.

Some poets live all their lives in salt water. Archilocus and Matthew Arnold are salt-water poets.

Some poets spend part of their lives in salt water and part in fresh water.
Gertrude Stein and Allen Ginsberg are two of them.

Poets are very well fitted for writing poetry. They have hands or feet for
writing. Most of them can move through life easily because they are
streamlined. Most of them are protected by scales.

Of course, poets must find their food in the water about them. Many catch
such animals as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Many others live on a "soup"
made up of very tiny vowels and consonants. We call this "soup" the
alphabet.

It is easy to tell that most poets are poets. But some have queer shapes.
William Butler Yeats has his eyes on stalks. T.S. Eliot is almost all head.
Elizabeth Bishop has a thin tail she can twist around seaweed. Apollinaire
is flat and has both his eyes on the same side of his head. Ezra Pound is
long and rather like a snake.

Poets are among nature's most accomplished seduction artists. They have
been writing greeting card verse for hundreds of years.

People used to call any animal that writes poetry a poet. "Poet" is still a
part of the name of many animals that are not poets. The poetaster is not a
true poet. The poetess and poet laureate are not true poets either. None of
these animals has a backbone. Many people still think of literary critics as poets. They would change their minds if they saw a baby literary critic
nursing.


Martin Amis is a Big Fat Idiot

I used to live on the Upper West Side in 1995.
No, I didn't. I lived on Avenue B in 1995. I always say I lived on the
Upper West Side though. Because my ex-wife lived there when I first came to New York City. So that's where I used to live. On the Upper West Side.

A lot has happened between then and now, but somehow, looking back, it
seems things happened for no rhyme or reason. It doesn't seem all that
interesting because (1) it was a long time ago and, (b) it's just too complicated.

What's important is that I'm a poet. In his 1995 book The Information,
Martin Amis pokes fun at various poets who hang out on Avenue B, can't
drive, get all the women, and are the lowest life forms on the literary
food chain. Amis has a point; "poet" is a word that has always been disliked by poets themselves, perhaps on the grounds that poetry is irrelevant and that the word implies disparagement of the author's literary abilities.

What? Chicken butt. So what if I lived on Avenue B? So what if my driver's
license expired sixteen years ago? I'm a bad driver anyway. At least I get
women. Lots of women. I've been described as the lid for every pot. ("Pot" is almost "Topp" backwards.) I'm not very intelligent. Kind of slow. I
write too much. What I want most is to write good poems. I keep trying.


Regret

According to a friend, Larry David's worldview could be summarized as "I know, I should have had the chicken."


Relax

According to a recent study, men's sweat contains a pheronome that makes women less nervous and tense.


Laughter

Laughter, according to Reader's Digest, is "the best medicine."


Mother Said

"Your father's first wife
was a lesbian,"
she said,
fingering my tie.


As Seen On TV

"Use Toothodent with Delirium."


Balloon

      o

 ball on.