The Sixties

Times were hard, verse was grammar's black economy,
its solvent syntax sniffed in backstreets, beyond the
reach of kids like me, safe inside the library.
On Merseyside, performance upstaged sophistry,
until those stars sold out, rewinding history.
By degrees, free form and love became too risky,
and heritage plumped up its bibliography,
rotating stock on dusty shelves until oh gee,

those Yanks arrived, so cool, so hot their poetry
swept up dropped meanings like a stripper booed off the
stage. But I missed her rhymeless, gargoyled ecstasy,
I wept for her because she did not weep for me.
I moulded words, stuck pins into her effigy
not to take revenge upon the world, more to see
if clay would scream - but words just leaked their mystery.
The moon stopped chasing me in 1963.

[Index] [next poem] [LitRefs]

tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk