What’s More Painful Than Alice Walker’s Poetry?

Alice Walker’s poetry, illustrated.

Actually, in all fairness, this is one of the better examples of Stefano Vitale’s artwork for Why War Is Never a Good Idea, which is about as good as it can be considering what he’s being asked to work with. Because Walker’s poetry really is as bad as all that, a classic example of what Thomas Disch dismissed as “snapped prose in slim volumes.” And, sure, I feel a teensy bit guilty ragging on a kid’s book meant to honor the United Nations International Day of Peace, but let’s face it, sucky literature will not bring about world peace. Here’s the “best” part, which I’m going to render as the prose it is, to save space:

Picture a donkey peacefully sniffing a pile of straw A small boy holds the end of its frayed rope bridle. They do not see it They are both thinking of dinner The boy is hoping for polenta & eggs maybe a carrot or apple for dessert. Just above them something dark big as a car is dropping.

Bleargh.

22 September 2007 | poetry |

Paul Zimmer, “Zimmer Envying Elephants”

I have a wide, friendly face
Like theirs, yet I can’t hang
My nose like a fractured arm
Nor flap my dishpan ears.
I can’t curl my canine teeth,
Swing my tail like a filthy tassel,
Nor make thunder without lightning.

But I’d like to thud amply around
For a hundred years or more,

Stuffing an occasional tree top
Into my mouth, screwing hugely for
Hours at a time, gaining weight,
And slowly growing a few hairs.

Once in a while I’d charge a power pole
Or smash a wall down just to keep
Everybody loose and at a distance.

From Crossing to Sunlight Revisited: New and Selected Poems. Zimmer, the former director of the University of Georgia Press and then the University of Iowa Press, has published a dozen volumes of poetry and a collection of essays, After the Fire, about his life in the publishing industry. This is a sequel of sorts to the 1996 collection Crossing to Sunlight, even referencing that book’s cover art.

11 July 2007 | poetry |