In a NYT Book Review essay titled “Don’t Feed the Poets”, Jim Harrison writes of a book length poem titled “Bourgeois Poet” by Karl Shapiro, whose critical views towards T.S. Eliot’s poetry and M.F.A. style backslapping I happen to share. Apparently, Shapiro felt the same minor agony I now suffer from (only by choice, and only on occasions I dare to recall, in Robert Creeley’s words, “the self at the window”), the agony of how to be a poet in spite of having a 401(k), an investment portfolio, and other such accouterments of the bourgeoisie life. Harrison, with great wit, describes the symptoms of this agony thusly:

”I suspect Shapiro’s evident misery started early in his life with a heroic notion of the poet. Any poet knows that to become immortal all you have to do is write a single great poem. This is unlikely indeed. Perhaps there are tens of thousands of mules and draft horses across the countryside who dream of winning the Kentucky Derby. Better yet, a bartender in Seville told me last March, “We have thousands of aspiring Lorcas but only one Lorca.” Very early on a poet is struck by the cruelty and lack of democracy in the arts — so few get it all, and the hordes receive nothing but the pleasure and pain of an overdeveloped consciousness.”

Touché Mr. Harrison! I indeed suffer from the pain of an overdeveloped consciousness, which makes me brood incessantly first thing in the morning, as I ride in a train that passes through industrial landscapes with their smokestacks, junked cars, heaps of concrete and brick, garbage landfills, snow on the cattails bowing in the wind, janitors with tiredness in their sleepy faces, on this cursed business of borrowing greenish papery silk to cocoon myself from physical hunger, and feeling this weaker mental hunger at the same time to join Uncle Whitman’s verbal carousing in Hoboken dives, many of which are in the process of being Manhattanized.