Some Options for a Career in Poetry

You can be a forthright Beatnik, sincere
insight blossoms burning political

You can be jauntily arrogant, immersed
in New York’s powerful rhyming days and
steady pop relations

You can be Black Mountain bardic boom voice
dispensing subjectivity (see Beatniks above, line 1)

You can be the heart of a jaguar
beating with dense thuds in Amazonian flora

You can be a Marxist Post-Structuralist or something
(though this would seem a contradiction)
and take on the wobbly
experience of subjectivity stressed in words
and buying things

You can be Walt Whitman and speak
for the people, or whatever he says we are in his mystic gravy

You can be a dead author declining
the value of the subject according
to the fictions of many

You can be a generator for irony from
the googly matrix of Google (see Marxist Post-Structuralist above, line 10)

You can be a Grand Pooh-Bah caging
poets in cagey categories
collecting blood and shit for the storage
of future geneaologists

You can be an important, award-winning figure
for creative writing students
who touch themselves with your greatness
throbbing away the night

You can be coolly educated
on Foucault and Deleuze, it’s okay
we all do it, but run to your nearest Anglo-
Saxon dictionary
before you say anything about it

You can be an elliptical person, or
just pretend to be
post-modern despite
the U Iowa degree

You can be disturbed and frightening
when you’re young on drugs and sex
(we all secretly love you)
but it gets old unless you sublate
it, like a master craftsperson

You can be a new formalist, we like
your sturdy attention to how words move
just catch up to the speech and concerns
of pulse-beat human beings

You can be a dabbler in verse
working the day job with kids
or a devoted adept
alive in the work and with kids

You can be a liberated individual
because a lot of truly great action has gone down
to let you share in the freakery of identity
but in your poetry consider
how to most damage Capital!

You can tickle Grand Pooh-Bah (see above, line 21)
in his Hut
by laughing out loud
or cutting the equivalent
of electronic farts
in his blog’s comments fields

You can be an identity ethicist (see above, somewhere)
blasting tunnel vision
upon the object you desire to be

You can be a burnt-out radical innovator
or just tired with words and watch
the accumulating compromise of
your life pass by

You can be a saintly sage inspirer
of the generations of copy-niks
who must imitate the style and finesse
you so graciously release from the dark abyss
of unconscious word

You can be drunk staggering fool
high on any manufactured pharm
barfing your morning ritual
hung-over sleep-deprived waiting
for that first can of beer

You can subvert the romantic modus
of genius, inspiration and taste
but that’s old hat

You can sleep with a teacher or student
to break the transferential code
of pedagogy or simply to make
a name in the banter
that makes a scene a scene

You can be reserved, austere, pitiless agent
of the toothless muses
but take it easy
someone may laugh

You can publish the elder poets whose work
remains in neglect, make a name
for yourself as another maker of
maps in the poetic geneaologies

You can live in bitter confinement
nine-to-fiving in economic servility
bile for all contemporary successes
your neglect demands respect

You can be a Buddhist ex-alcoholic
teacher of invention
ethos what is ethos
but the beginning of self
education

You can be physically distinct
and watch time drag its claws
through features
of your author bio photos

You can be surprised to one day like
something that maybe you wouldn’t have
some time back

when rigid boundaries mattered
You can be hateful for
how the cards are stacked
never enough attention finds
its way to you

You can be the voice of the Cosmos
goddamn!
or sing the songs of greenery
in respect of seasons

You can be a writer of sonnets like
Shakespeare, Keats, Denby, Berrigan
in them things could out
the self in words to make
a monument against the vast
black blankness of time

You can turn upon your audience
cut them no slack in epigrams
that bring them up to the self
recognition of ethical compromise
in dubious dream-wave attention

You can experiment with the alphabet
write with vowels and thesauri
to excavate the obsessive
violent contradictions showing
bodies violate language

You can be a writer of epic drafts and
committed 1960s dreams of
revolution but
why bother

You can be passionate about many issues
and still miss the “bigger picture”
someone wants something for everything
this is the problem with democracy

You can be a potato
zoned in the breeze where bees buzz
in lyric nothings
where humming birds join them
getting stoned in the pollinated stems

-Dale Smith