Now we need to get rid of these poems
Which are actually prose.
Poems as prose can be great, as far as that goes.
Prose is more detailed and exquisite.
Place names! Ship names! Let’s go and visit.
Let’s meet the prose-poem writer, who is a regular guy.
You’ll read about the death of his wife and you will cry.
The children around the bed, the good wife
Trying to say goodbye through a tube. Prose captures life.
The great poets get closer and closer to prose
As life becomes more modern. A poem? I once wrote one of those.
I received high praise from the high school teacher
Who acted quite a bit like a nineteenth century preacher.
But when I got older, I learned in the bar
From graduate students verse wasn’t going to take me very far.
All of the cool things prose does it does so well
Poetry survives only in that Italian poem about hell.
Tomorrow they’ll make fun of Dante on SNL
And then it will be over—poetry will be dead
And live, but in silence, in the stars overhead.