BLACK MOUNTAIN ALUMNI
A Charles Olson tailgater bluesanelle
Desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell,
In North Carolina and elsewhere in hell,
I wished my Black Mountain students well.
They called me the “Poor Man’s Ezra Pound”
Because I imitated old Ezra Pound.
Desperate with the tawdriness of my life in hell
At Little Back Mountain in grim Buffalo
Where in my dotage I lingered fallow,
I wished the new Black Mountain students well.
They spread everywhere, from Key West to Calgary,
Like crab-apple seeds strewn by Poundian cavalry
Desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell.
They didn’t know verse from a mixed flock of poultry,
They had no notion how to write poetry --
I wished my Black Mountain students well,
Hoped for the best, but I feared the worst,
Hoped they’d eat steak, but they probably got wurst --
I wished my Black Mountain students well,
Desperate with the tawdriness of their life in hell.
Copyright © 2013 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.
Epitaphs for Charles Olson and Ezra Pound may be found here:
Wesli Court’s Epitaphs
for the Poets, by Lewis Turco,
Baltimore, MD: BrickHouse Books, (www.BrickHouseBooks.com) 2012, paperback, ISBN:
978-1-938144-01-1.
A critical essay on Charles Olson and the Black Mountain School of poetry may be found here:
Dialects of the Tribe: Postmodern American Poets and Poetry, by Lewis Putnam Turco, Nacogdoches, TX: Stephen F. Austin State University Press, www.SFASU.edu/sfapress/, 2012, 336 pp., paperback.
A critical essay on Ezra Pound may be found here:
Visions and Revisions of American Poetry by Lewis Putnam Turco, Fayetteville, AK: University of Arkansas Press, 1986, 178 pp., ISBN 0938626493, cloth; ISBN 0938626507, paper. Melville Cane Award of the Poetry Society of America.
