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Dante & the Response Poem |
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David Shapiro's response poem (+ notes on the form)
Dante and Beatrice (At Forty-Seven)
are kitsch six inches of a gold bronze toy
sculpture on my wife's dead grandmother's
delicate end-tables ours
separated by a red grave and pink
candles and some smaller
horribly-shaped vegetable-like candles pointing
Dante looks like the mayor showing not pointing
of a small-town corruption
in a small cap he wears not against the
winter a cruel righteous careerist
grim as glucose and morose to boot
boasting of pride like a tiger on a street
Beatrice in nightgown her sin hope
a girl always about to go to bed
by herself and her long ringlets
as voluptuous as her nightgown
She is sexual and sad and refuses
to look at that business-man of words
all this a gift from Mickey Mouse who
said when he saw them it had to be
for me Goofy who took the sleep
out of the Comedy and took the
flowers and took the fathers, too
until what was left for a fatuous cento
like a student who translates
all vulgarity into ancient Greek a mistake
So if a person loves you they could say
I want to be in Hell with you forever
like two bats summoned on a windy
word by a poet having a mid-life decision
Both are ready for bed after six centuries
of poetry and epic youth and new songs
but I don't think they will do much
in bitter Riverdale like intense butterflies
She's perhaps too much the mother of Christ
and he's had a bad day in exile's
office writing to Miss Stone a stone himself in grass
He has a vague memory of this golden
sister her beginning breasts like end-words
But his mind is intent on astronomical
details like halakhic investigations
She turns out to be my melancholy mother
hoping working for better schools for
black children in South Africa
and justice like a child's story
This is a monstrous mixed marriage
and should be put an end to like a too-
accompanied sonata and before a dream
he's a generation too old and she
should indeed sleep with Romeo/Marat dying
in her glorious lap like a bronze invasion
He is the terror of the old last poet alive
diplomat of letters and lives
plunging the real prayer into the unreal earth
And I in love with each word and her wordlessness
Her shadow on the white world down the wall
God is a candle
D. Shapiro
A Note on the Text from David Shapiro: Response poems, as I'm defining them, are not just correspondence or letter poems, but poems where another poet uses, transforms and utterly responds or answers one poem with another. So this form entails some questions. Is Frank O’Hara’s “Talking to the Sun” a response poem to Mayakovsky? Only partly. I wrote a “Prayer for my Son” where every end-word of Yeats was first used. It comes very close to a response poem. Is every parody a response? Hmmm. Variations on a Theme -- are variations always responses? Is there any poem that's not a “response” to another poem -- isn't that Bloom's theory? But the “response poems” we are talking about make influence utterly explicit. Or do they? Good luck with defining and refining this genre. One Lima-Shapiro (Phoneism) variant to this genre is that the poets respond to the poem even before they “see” it. The poet who can include the most of the first poem “wins,” just kidding. Or is it: The poet who loves the other poem the most wins. Other response poems are like centos. Hebrew poets made up many of their poems with garlands of quotations (see the medieval poem called “Song of the Creatures,” a tissue of quotations). The response poem is obviously indicated by Tu Fu and Li Po’s “letter poems,” but the best analogy here is perhaps, also, DeKooning and Erased DeKooning. Peter Gizzi responded to one of my poems and later said he had “erased” it. Responses may seem threatening, but should be accepted in the mode of deKooning who said: “I'll make it hard for you.”
Next page > Frank Lima's reponse poem, in terza rima > page 1, 2, 3
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