Against Slams

I heard this on a podcast the other day and realized I'd always held Nemerov at arm's length and now I don't know why! What's not for me to like? A traditionalist with a realist streak, steeped in Western poetic tradition but with few delusions of grandeur or stream-of-consciousness sleight-of-hand. (Incidentally, his sister was Diane Arbus, famous avant-garde photographer and Nicole Kidman biopic subject.)


Nemerov is slick but still gritty, born with a spoon in his mouth and a pen in his hand. He rhymes "still and tilted track" with "zodiac" and it does not feel forced, like it ought to according to every natural universal law of God and man. Instead, it's a revelation right at the end that took the air out of me. And this was while just LISTENING to it: and as I've mentioned before, I don't even think you have experienced a poem until you've read it!


Screw those defiant anti-establishment slammers railing about how poetry is an oral art form: if you love Homer so much, why don't you marry him and have, like, a hundred of his blind illegitimate demigods? It was an oral tradition because television hadn't been invented, LOLcats hadn't been invented, and the only entertainment available to these half-wit barbarian yokels was some jerkoff storyteller who couldn't remember a golldarn thing if it didn't rhyme!


A thing or two has changed since those wonderful idyllic days: we've had six centuries of movable type, declared illiteracy a disease to be stamped out with a ferocity usually only meted out to YA vampire fan-fiction, and harnessed the power of the electron to transmit texts instantaneously around our dear spinning planet! But no, you're right, we have to sit in an auditorium of tattooed hipsters and equally tattooed judges (when did poetry get judges?! Is there a drug out there that isn't performance-enhancing for a poet?) and immerse ourselves in your verse stylings about how stupid the government and society and your parents are in order to have a firm grasp on how true poesy is meant to be experienced...


Go back to the emo hole you crawled out of, you Emily Strange-looking jackass, and read some freaking Nemerov. You make me SICK.

The Goose Fish

Howard Nemerov

On the long shore, lit by the moon   
To show them properly alone,   
Two lovers suddenly embraced   
So that their shadows were as one.   
The ordinary night was graced
For them by the swift tide of blood   
That silently they took at flood,   
And for a little time they prized
   Themselves emparadised.


Then, as if shaken by stage-fright   
Beneath the hard moon’s bony light,   
They stood together on the sand   
Embarrassed in each other’s sight   
But still conspiring hand in hand,   
Until they saw, there underfoot,
As though the world had found them out,   
The goose fish turning up, though dead,
   His hugely grinning head.


There in the china light he lay,   
Most ancient and corrupt and grey.   
They hesitated at his smile,
Wondering what it seemed to say
To lovers who a little while
Before had thought to understand,   
By violence upon the sand,
The only way that could be known   
   To make a world their own.


It was a wide and moony grin
Together peaceful and obscene;
They knew not what he would express,   
So finished a comedian
He might mean failure or success,   
But took it for an emblem of
Their sudden, new and guilty love
To be observed by, when they kissed,   
   That rigid optimist.


So he became their patriarch,
Dreadfully mild in the half-dark.
His throat that the sand seemed to choke,   
His picket teeth, these left their mark   
But never did explain the joke
That so amused him, lying there
While the moon went down to disappear   
Along the still and tilted track
   That bears the zodiac.