Wm. Howard Ellis
Wm. Howard Ellis grew up Fall / Winters in Manhattan, New York, Spring / Summers in East Aurora, New York, Buffalo, NY, or Lake Muskoka, Canada. There he gained a love of the wilderness and will live never more in a city. He was educated at Colby College in Maine and earned a Masters in Learning and Behavioral Disorders in Buffalo. He meandered across Texas, up to Santa Cruz, CA, and then back across to Maine, where he has lived, taught, sculpted, and written poetry since 1992.
Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein is a language poet born in New York City in 1950. He received his BA from Harvard College. Among his more than twenty books of poetry are Girly Man (University of Chicago Press, 2006), With Strings (2001), Republics of Reality: 1975–1995 (2000), Dark City (1994), Rough Trades (1991), The Nude Formalism (1989), Stigma (1981), Legend (with Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery, Ron Silliman, Ray DiPalma, 1980), and Parsing (1976). Currently, he is Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
Remember When Poetry Was Fun?
remember when poetry was fun?
remember when Jane & John Q. General Public
didn’t think readings were less fun than going to the dentist?
remember when poetry was a radical revolutionary act
& poets were banned & arrested
for speaking their truth?
remember when poets went out to have fun
& drink & smoke & get wasted & get laid
& didn’t expect to get paid?
remember when there were radical lesbians,
engaged environmentalist vegetarians & activists
& transvestites who rocked out with their cocks out?
remember when poets cared & dared to be different?
remember when poets alchemically transformed words
into metaphysical mercury
& changed the world?
remember when Ginsberg said “I HERE NOW DECLARE
THE END OF THE WAR”
& he meant it?
remember when poets loved each other
& didn’t want to just spew & leave?
remember when poetry wasn’t all whining & complaining
& co–dependant crap
about your love affair with your cat?
remember when there were cowboy poets
& pirate poets
& punk rock poets
& performance artists
who smashed watermelons & juggled chainsaws as they read? remember when poetry was a catalyst
for hope & change
& everybody hoped to have a good time
& when it wasn’t fun
we made it fun?
remember when poetry was fun?
I Like Being Old
I really do like being old, having come this far,
having heard and seen, mistaken and known
and done. Especially done.
You may think it resignation, making the best
of the inevitable deal,
maybe a joke.
But what could be better than these fertile memories,
moments the greatest novelist couldn’t make up,
people and places shaping a century?
Great grandchild moving beyond grandchildren
who take my children’s lives high
and extended my own?
Experience enough to separate what matters
from what isn’t worth one moment
of concern?
True, I must pay attention to stiff joints
and creaking bones, navigate each step
up or down a flight of stairs:
challenge against the fateful fall,
wonder about a wavering kidney,
eat less of what I love
and more of that cafeteria–bland food
I saw my parents repeat
day after boring day.
No longer can I toss a full head of hair
but carefully comb what remains
to cover blotches of pale scalp,
wonder why so little grows
where it once did me proud,
so much where it isn’t welcome.
My body moves more slowly now
while my mind, when present,
is an ocean of furious waves
sinking ships and revealing
underwater marvels
simultaneously.
Wisdom travels arthritic fingertips,
memory prunes itself
of bitter twigs
as it grows roots that ask questions
and will help sustain
generations beyond my touch.
It’s all good. More than good as I embrace
this red rock landscape, this place
that belongs to me
and absorb each whispering sound
of language and wind,
with you, love: brilliant pollinated center
of my extraordinary many–petaled life.