Three Sonnets on Contemporary Poetry, by Joseph S. Salemi

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Prerequisites for a Trendy Poetry Reading

Casual clothes, streetwise but debonair:
Knit sweater, denims (slightly dishabille);
A tentative, apologetic air,
As if you told what you would most conceal;

Credentials of the avant garde, implied
In the unstudied flexion of your spine;
A contrapposto at the lectern’s side
To match the supine slackness of your line;

Serious subjects, or some apt remark
That shows you au courant with modern times;
Personal torment, but conjoined with stark
Social awareness of our bourgeois crimes;

Above all else, an audience of sods
That hears its platitudes confirmed, and nods.

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Poetry Today

Since Baudelaire and Verlaine, the field has shrunk:
Mere feelings, hokum, moral cant, and whining.
In greater ages, poetry was drunk
On Bacchic dance, blood lust, occult divining,
The savagery of Swift, the wit of Byron,
Poe’s death-wish, Dowson’s pedophilic viols;
The obscene lisping of a sluttish siren
Formed Wilde and Swinburne’s Dionysian styles.

No tawdry brothels now, nor spired cathedrals:
Just thatched mud huts for lemmings to call home—
Epiphanies of small, pathetic people
As pallid as a cracked and sunbleached bone.
Today verse wears the regulation dress
Of inoffensive bourgeois politesse.

from The New Formalist

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On a Workshopped Poem

How nice! You’ve seen to every single thing.
Congratulations on your deft removal
Of any phrase that might offend or sting
The consciousness of Those Who Grant Approval.

There is no word disparaging or vicious;
No heinous hint of ethnic derogation.
Your verse is free from anything suspicious
Like thought or wit or humorous deflation.

You’ve excised terms insensitive and callous,
All slurs, invective, insult, and aspersions.
You’ve stayed away from vulva and from phallus
(We do not sanction those obscene diversions).

Indeed, you’ve labored long and hard. And now
Your poem is as placid as a cow.

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Joseph S. Salemi has published five books of poetry, and his poems, translations and scholarly articles have appeared in over one hundred publications world-wide.  He is the editor of the literary magazine Trinacria and writes for Expansive Poetry On-line. He teaches in the Department of Humanities at New York University and in the Department of Classical Languages at Hunter College.