Vivian has been pestering me again, so I thought I'd type another poem. I have been thinking about poetry and patronage lately, and in my research came across the fact that Teddy Roosevelt did provide a stipend to E.A. Robinson after reading his first book--Robinson just had to show up: he read the paper and left it on the chair of his office at a NY customs house, to show he'd been there.



I also unearthed the fact that no Republicans have--is commissioned the right word?--well, given audience to an inaugural poem. At least of late. Kennedy famously had Robert Frost read "The Gift Outright," which is a loathsome poem I think (I don't want to memorize that one though perhaps I should, so I can drag it out whenever I want to prove my point about how poetry and politics do not mix usually, either for the purposes of the left or for the right and that goes for antiwar poems too.) Clinton had first Maya Angelou then Miller Williams (father of Lucinda) concoct poems for his inaugurals. Carter had James Dickey (must research what that wild man wrote.)



But no poems for Bush. And now he has been burned reciprocally by the poets. I've been wondering why it is exactly that poetry aligns itself with the left. Is it because, being not a profit-making endeavor, poetry lies outside the capitalist loop, and is therefore threatening?

There is more to it that I have to think through.



Okay but back to Robinson: I've known "Richard Cory" forever, because it was a Simon and Garfunkel song. His morals are simple, but that is the charm of the poems: they position themselves so opposite the cerebral calisthenics that T.S. Eliot was doing in those same years. The other day though I also found this one which has echoed with me.



Reuben Bright



Because he was a butcher and thereby

did earn an honest living (and did right),

I would not have you think that Reuben Bright

Was any more a brute than you or I;



For when they told him that his wife must die,

He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,

And cried like a great baby half that night,

And made the women cry to see him cry.



And after she was dead, and he had paid

The singers and the sexton and the rest,

He packed a lot of things that she had made

Most mournfully away in an old chest

Of hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs

In with them, and tore down the slaughter house.





That's it: quite simple. But it makes me wish for rhyming poetry again, and yet when poets do rhyme these days, it (the poem) is usually like a businessman trying to hold a barn-raising or driving around in his model T on Sundays, everything so forced and corny. Rhyme is something we cannot go back to, at least not in the Reuben Bright way. This makes the poem so doubly sad. I don't have any solution.