"What interests me is that Byron would be way down in the order of poets who have influenced me. Shelley and Blake among his contemporaries, but B is one of the few who made poetry out of his disgust with the ruling powers, and it is that affinity that made me offer this pairing." --Brian Richards.
"It's easy to be a Romantic," the poet said, "if you don't have to mind the evidence." What some come to do (e.g., Byron, Dorn, Richards) is hard, head against rock of the world, the hard tasking of the self to maintain a vision of the otherwise, especially in a day when miscreance and inanity seep from every crevice in the culture 24-7 (though, to be honest, some of that includes reruns). Even worse, this meagerness and confusion of the spirit for centuries (many millennia) consistently parades itself as the ethical and intelligent (even spiritual) norm. Gravitas, indeed. They facilitate larceny on the citizenry, they infect nations with their confused rapacity for wealth and power, they cower from the imagination like a boy masturbating in the corner (to no avail), they spread their dissemination in thickening layers so that they, themselves in the end might believe them (also to no avail), they speed a significant portion of their time decorating their bunker, and they of the few good reasons to applaud death's agency, . . . . though they tend to last too long, while many poets die young . . . but not without comment!
"It's easy to be a Romantic," the poet said, "if you don't have to mind the evidence." What some come to do (e.g., Byron, Dorn, Richards) is hard, head against rock of the world, the hard tasking of the self to maintain a vision of the otherwise, especially in a day when miscreance and inanity seep from every crevice in the culture 24-7 (though, to be honest, some of that includes reruns). Even worse, this meagerness and confusion of the spirit for centuries (many millennia) consistently parades itself as the ethical and intelligent (even spiritual) norm. Gravitas, indeed. They facilitate larceny on the citizenry, they infect nations with their confused rapacity for wealth and power, they cower from the imagination like a boy masturbating in the corner (to no avail), they spread their dissemination in thickening layers so that they, themselves in the end might believe them (also to no avail), they speed a significant portion of their time decorating their bunker, and they of the few good reasons to applaud death's agency, . . . . though they tend to last too long, while many poets die young . . . but not without comment!
But, of course
it might be thought that
when the Antiquities Advisory Board heads told the VeePee Something
Needed To Be Done to save Babylon and Nineveh
sacked again
they were informing the fox
that the chicken ladder had been
left down.
Not
so. Il Consigliere had
long before been briefed on the Op to
procure for his new offices inside the mountain under
Camp David prelapsarian golden oldies.
Only the Primary
Client had Mossadim to encourage the curators in separating
the ancient from the ersatz.
Just a little
tidying up of the mess liberation
necessarily makes without
line-item expense to the Budget.
--Brian Richards
--Brian Richards
DON JUAN, Canto IX: i-ii.
Oh, Wellington! (or "Villainton"--for Fame
Sounds the heroic syllables both ways;
France could not even conquer your great name,
But punned it down to this facetious phrase--
Beating or beaten she will laugh the same,)
You have obtained great pensions and much praise:
Glory like yours should any dare gainsay,
Humanity would rise, and thunder "Nay!"
France could not even conquer your great name,
But punned it down to this facetious phrase--
Beating or beaten she will laugh the same,)
You have obtained great pensions and much praise:
Glory like yours should any dare gainsay,
Humanity would rise, and thunder "Nay!"
I don't think that you used Kinnaird quite well
In Marinèt's affair--in fact, 't was shabby,
And like some other things won't do to tell
Upon your tomb in Westminster's old Abbey.
Upon the rest 't is not worth while to dwell,
Such tales being for the tea-hours of some tabby;
But though your years as man tend fast to zero,
In fact your Grace is still but a young Hero.
In Marinèt's affair--in fact, 't was shabby,
And like some other things won't do to tell
Upon your tomb in Westminster's old Abbey.
Upon the rest 't is not worth while to dwell,
Such tales being for the tea-hours of some tabby;
But though your years as man tend fast to zero,
In fact your Grace is still but a young Hero.
--Lord George Gordon Byron
Bio: lives in a shack without pipes or wires on a ridge overlooking the Ohio River.
Books:
BREAKING AND ENTERING, Lily Press, 1974
LOOSE FISH, Black Book, 1978
EARLY ELEGIES, Bloody Twin, 1992
LONG SONG WATER POND. Anthology. Bloody Twin, 1999.
ONLY THEN MAY THE DAY BE KEPT, Pavement Saw, 2003
ENRIDGED, University of New Orleans, 2011
New work appears periodically in HOUSE ORGAN.
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