The other day John E. McIntyre published some original poetry. I enjoyed it. He wrote about his profession and some inherent challenges of a copy editor. This is one of my favorite verses:
A reporter’s hand
reaches for a thesaurus;
screams die in my throat
He got me to thinking of the last Haiku I wrote:
Annie is sad now
Her beloved birds have all died
Unexpected freeze
It’s not very good and it got me to thinking of the first time I read some of Baudelaire’s poetry. I came across a poem that I thought was not very good. In fact, I thought there must be some backstory explaining how such morbid imagery could slip into the love poem of a great poet. I thought, ‘even great poets have bad days.’
I crawl across your body like a horde
Of worms across a corpse
On my second reading of The Nightly Heavens Are Not More Beautiful, I realized that the poet had simply gone where I would have never imagined a love poem could go.
That brings me to Fernando Perez: I write from Caracas, the murder capital of the world, where I’ve been employed by the Leones to score runs and prevent balls from falling in the outfield.
He continues:
Like poetry, baseball is a kind of counter culture. The (optional) isolation from the outside world (which I often opt for); the idleness about which — and out of which — so many poems are written or sung: I see this state of mind as a blessing. Sometimes, in fact, when I haven’t turned on a television or touched a newspaper for months, freed from the corporate bombast, poetry is the only dialect I recognize. — Poetry, September 2009 p. 442
