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Against rhyme and bad free verse
It's hard to write good poems, period. I have to admit that I've generally little or no use for most rhymed and metered poems, basically because there are so very few poets who are able to compose as such without seeming like they sacrificed emotion for a metronome and a rhyming dictionary. It is not something that pleases my ear under normal ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on July 3, 2009
the way of poetry i
Used to insist that poems that didn't have ''dirt under the fingernails'' were without value, insisting that live as it's lived by working men and women in America were more interesting , more complex and more important than the dense, academic poems one was made to read in contemporary poetry anthologies. In full disclosure, I was an ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on May 18, 2009
AFTER THE SERVICE: The Moans of the Embalmed
For starters, I would have junked the original title of this poem had I written and instead stared at the finished piece for a few moments, finally relying on the old trick of making the last full phrase of the poem the name of the piece. In this case, ''Sighs for My Meat''. Odd, strange, a communication from someone who can't find the ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on April 16, 2009
Re: from the "say it ain't so" files....
There is a long history of poets and critics declaring poetry is something completely other than prose, a separate art approximating a form of meta-writing that penetrates the circumscribed certainties of words and makes them work harder, in service to imagination, to reveal the ambiguity that is at the center of a literate population's ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on March 27, 2009
Christian Wiman's poem
Sometimes you can concentrate on something so closely that the thing or the idea becomes abstract, blurred or jagged at the edges, a layering of form and sound that makes for a crowded, frame busting tableau. ''It Takes Particular Clicks'' by the adroit and terse Christian Wiman makes me thing of a walk through a familiar set of scenes that are ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on February 11, 2009
On Slam Poetry
Slam poetry gets tedious quickly, the reason for which is that it's a style that knows one style, one attack, one speed, which is staccato, in your face, and angry. This isn't to say that there isn't a good slam poet here and there, but so much of what gets called poetry in these settings (that I've seen anyway) is an unfocused rant declaring ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on October 28, 2008
There is no standing still
There is no standing still I pulled the car to the sidehalf way across the bridgejust to look at the grey waterbelow being christened with wakesof barges hauling the remains ofthe month we've lost to a portwhere they can still drop anchorand all else besides. You don't drive, you said,lighting a cigarette I saw from the corner of my eye,long ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on September 20, 2008
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace wasn't my favorite writer, and I didn't quite ''get'' the metastatic comedy that was the central work in his short list of books, Infinite Jest, but I did read him often and closely enough in other novels, essays, short stories to see genius, real genius, perhaps the stand alone talent of his generation.He was extremely ...
Posted to Obit by Ted Burke on September 15, 2008
poem for this day
RAIN OF ANY KIND Everything is different yet nothing really isin the center of livesthat hang on every wordthat comes over phone linesand wireless transmissionsthat are voiceless nowwhere smoke , glass, the dustof humanity rises in billows andcurls and laces and balloons obscenelywhere it seemed the center of the worldwas a wealth of words ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on September 11, 2008
"Winter Accident"
We brought the dog home in the trunk. All the way from school Dad said she wasback there, feet on the same red carpet as mine. And so Laura Polley's sad little verse opens, promisingly, intriguingly, with a couple of declarative sentences that efficiently, even a bit brutishly set in the scene, a dead dog in the trunk, a little girl on a ...
Posted to Poems by Ted Burke on September 11, 2008

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