WHAT I SHOULD HAVE SAID
A Tennyson tailgater bluesanelle
O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Wannabe poets, Grub Street hack reviewers,
Tailor-made toadies redolent of sewers!
Birds of a feather, nit-picking barnyard peckers,
Faux grammarians, syntactical short-arm inspectors,
Wannabe poets, Grub Street hack reviewers,
Get thee behind me! You have too much cheek,
Too little comprehension of what is chic,
All you critics so redolent of sewers!
Writers write, those who can’t, review
Or teach what writers can or cannot do --
O you chorus of indolent reviewers,
Spewers of platitudes, duck-billed or not,
Aphoristic attackers of the Gordian knot,
All you critics so redolent of sewers,
Go skew another’s oeuvre, you moles, before
I skewer you. My point? I’ve no time for
Wannabe poets, Grub Street hack reviewers,
All you toilers so redolent of sewers!
Copyright © 2013 by Lewis Turco, all rights reserved.
An epitaph for Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 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.
Critical material on Walt Whitman 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.
