Let’s Begin Poetry Appreciation 2011 With A Bang:

Two Poems Containing The ‘****’ Word Seven Times

VazamBam

by Vassilis Zambaras

“Bukowski# Strikes Again”

Goddammit—

There is and there is not
A right way to write

A poem—

Which is like saying
Excuse me if I’m wrong but

Would it be all right
If I just say “**** it”?

“Blasphemous Intimations of Mortality”##

Was wirst du tun, Gott, wenn ich sterbe?###
—Rainer Maria Rilke

1.

You ****,

I keep telling this
Fly around my head,
Take a flying ****,
**** you. But when

I die, dear God,
Who will ****

The fly? You?

2.

spleen on the fly####

Oh, yeah?

You want some ****in’
Dead meat?

I’ll give you some,
You cocky mother

**** her, God
I done

Swat her,
Good.

MELIGALAS, Greece—(Weekly Hubris) 1/3/11—I don’t know about you, but if I were the Publishing-Editor of this here enterprise, right about now I’d be having second thoughts about having signed on this irreligious—perhaps even pagan?—poet hailing from the Greek boondocks; perhaps right about now, I’d actually be entertaining thoughts of taking his name off the masthead or, better yet, just taking his head off with a yataghan, cutting it into four pieces and spiking each on a four-masted schooner as a caveat for all those Puritan poetasters who think poetry should be a decent and wholesomely enjoyable vessel, something like a teapot without the tempest and, certainly not a container overflowing with nasty verbal excrement fit only for the dirty mouths of filthy guttersnipes. (****ing a, that was a mouthful!)

Having written all that juvenile nonsense, the footnotes accompanying the two poems above refer the readers to four remarkably different poets: Charles Bukowski, William Wordsworth, Rainier Maria Rilke, and Charles Baudelaire—each one practicing his art to the best of his ability.

If anybody out there gives a flying **** about all this and wants to find out which of the four was the most accomplished practitioner and/or who had the dirtiest mouth, I’d appreciate their writing and telling me so; in the meantime, here’s wishing all of you a great, ****ing 2011!

Footnote # “****ing Barfly” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Bukowski

Footnote ## “What will you do, God, when I die?” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainer_Maria_Rilke

Footnote ### “Ode: Intimations of Immortality” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wordsworth

Footnote #### “Paris Spleen” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire

Publishing-Editor’s Note: One of my very favorite poem sequences is Yeats’s (William Butler, that is) so-called “Crazy Jane” poems, which I was assigned to “discuss,” in front of my class, as a 15-year-old university freshman. My professor, a wild Irishman, had an evil sense of humor, and hoped I’d die of embarrassment. Boy had he picked the wrong teenager! “And Love has pitched his mansion in the place of excrement,” reads one of Yeats’s rolling phrases, and how I relished explaining that to a roomful of University of Georgia English majors (see below for entire poem). I would, also, refer O Kyrios Zambaras to my own collection of poems, The Crowded Bed, which beats about no four-poster in its ruminations upon our universal embodied condition. So, search not here for your prudish censor, Oh, Vassili! And don’t think I don’t know you’re just trying to find a way out of your WeeklyHubris deadlines!