Ode to an Ode
Who else will eulogize my odes:
I should’ve done screenplays, TV episodes,
Or paeans, or a funeral lament
To my bursting works, now not worth a cent –
They don’t care, they don’t know,
What I do, where I go:
But my riches, doomed
To a catacomb never exhumed,
Or sold in someone’s garage, –
Once a legacy, now a mirage –
Or dumped in a box on deserted shelves,
A dollar for my other thousand selves.
My flourishing, duplicate poems:
Foundlings who never found homes
We’re all the same, it’s a similar crime,
We’re not prosaic enough because of our rhyme;
But en guard you meaningless hacks
Who turn on meaning: watch your backs –
I lay down the gauntlet, epées for two,
Or Hamlet’s poison, your post facto due:
Welcome at last to the bareness
You might have been able to spare us:
Because we’re already so low
We never had too far to go –
May the lines you thought to malign
Be seen in the future to shine;
As you lie in the dirt unseeing,
The verbs you doubted will rise,
Your only triumph being
The writing you claimed to despise:
Let no man write your epitaph
Unless they do it for a laugh.
April 26th, 2026, Kaiholu
Explanation
I suffer for the poets, the songwriters, the actors down on their luck, all the people I admire so much: magicians kept down by the very people trained to help them, to teach them. My heart breaks for Saul Bellow’s fictional biography of Delmore Schwartz in Humboldt’s Gift, the great and funny book about the plight of the artist in American society.
I suffer with them all.
Ironically, our better spirits are trammeled not by shouting mobs with torches, but by people who have power, education, training, the accredited, who should know better, who try to close the door once they themselves are safely inside. Who are that much more complicit in the attempted denigration of the élan vital which makes them jealous.
May such people be denied everything they deny to everyone else. May their lives be bleak, picking as they do only on the weak.
The craft of such disparagers is to ravage the beautiful, the hopeful, the gutsy who throw their tinsel in the air hoping to dazzle.
The vitriol thrown at Beethoven is thrown at me, hundreds of years afterwards. Tchaikovsky’s piano concerto, one of the pillars of music, was savaged by the person to whom Tchaikovsky dedicated it. Editors never published A Confederacy of Dunces until John Kennedy Toole killed himself. His friends thought Giuseppe di Lampedusa wasn’t a writer simply because they knew him. He was an aristocrat, besides. Three months after he died, his book was published, became a constant best-seller, and was quickly recognized as one of the great books of Italy. Schubert heard his work performed exactly once, other than the marches he played for parties in the burbs. But he was Schubert! And no one ever suspected. Dvorak was looked down on by Vienna because he was a Czech. Women weren’t allowed to create because they were women. All women have such tragedies that haunt their souls.
Aristocrats weren’t allowed to write because it wasn’t done (and yet most writers were aristocrats, because they had the leisure and the education.) Zimerman’s piano was blown up by the U.S. homeland security because “it smelled like a bomb.” Zimerman was known to use a variety of lacquers on the hammers to produce the glistening sound he wanted from Chopin. He never returned to the U.S.
I identify with Edmond Dantès. Don Diego de la Vega. The Pimpernel. The Vicomte de Bragelonne. Don’t we all? We are on the side of the avenging angels, the ugly, generous gargoyles who watch over ancient, religious cities.
We watch over the pettiness, the invidiousness, try to help where we can, and despair.