Poet Laureate
One day I came home from work, at the bank,
and a newspaper reporter called me to ask if I was
the Jack Saunders nominated for Poet Laureate of
the State of
of it.” Turns out the state had nominated everyone they had
a dossier on and sent the names in a press release to media outlets
in their county. My reporter was very clever. He called everyone
on the list and asked them who they thought the best poet in the state was
and they all said, “Me.” You have to feel that way to do it. Still,
I felt like a horse’s ass. He got me. I did some research and found out
they were having a contest, and then would name Edmund Skillings,
a protégé of Secretary of State George Firestone, to the post.
It was a charade, to make things look on the up-and-up.
I didn’t stand a chinaman’s chance.
This pissed me off. I decided
to campaign for the post.
I wrote three pamphlets.
In the Wind, Field Book, and Screed.
I called myself the Poet Pretender. I said I was
the genuine poet, and the likely winner was an impostor.
A counterfeit. A fake. I said he would be a person
who taught writing in a university, won fine arts grants,
had his books published by little magazines subsidized by
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), served on panels,
for prizes, and handed out as much arts patronage as he got.
He was a ticketpuncher, brownnosing his way to the top,
getting his ticket punched at every station. A tired old
sexual turnstile through which presumably we all must pass
(apologies to Lawrence Durrell). My pamphlets were a hit with
outsider writers who felt excluded by the machinery for rewarding artists
that had been co-opted by pissants associated with college writing programs.
In one of the pamphlets I mentioned that John Coltrane played with
Eddie Cleanhead Vinson. That’s where you learned to break the mold.
Not in the cloister. Out there on the killing floor.
Goddamn poseur. Poetaster. Sad days are these
in
A velvet smoking jacket with blow-out patches on the elbow.
I work. I get dirty. I sweat. I stomp my own snakes.
My wife keeps backyard chickens.
We get varmints. But not cockroaches.
I can kill a possum. A marsupial has a bifurcated dick.
He fucks the female in the nose and she snorts the babies into her pouch.
Every southern boy knows this. It is an urban legend. It is myth.
It is poppycock. Horse pookie.
Canned fried green beans and cream of mushroom soup.
The above-ground gourmet lives!
Your boutonnières, your cocktail parties.
Your Dip Wars. No, that was later, at Tulane.
Caroling the faculty. The grad student/faculty mixers.