The history poems have not been written <br />The poems after Milosz <br />The Wallace Stevens poems will never be written <br />I can’t come close <br />I have tried the Blake poems <br />But of course I am not near them either <br />I would like to the ironic intellectual poems <br />I might be able to do them <br />I could do a kind of surrealistic association mind poem a prose poem <br />But I don’t like that very much <br />The poems of Jerusalem have not been good enough <br />Poems of propaganda are awkward and unacceptable <br />The small poems that tell of my life <br />They are for me the chance at real poetry <br />And I will continue as best I can with them <br />The American poems I have not yet found the idiom for <br />I can be epigrammatic in Emerson Thoreau fashion <br />But not with the hard New England observing eye <br />Borges poems I love <br />And the stories of mind and literature <br />Making the drama of a life of a storyteller <br />Interest me <br />But I doubt I could truly do them well <br />Imitation can only take one so far <br />And through it one may lose one’s way entirely <br />I can really do only what I am <br />Not the Dickinson poems nor the Hopkins poems nor the Wordsworth poems nor the Keats poems nor the Amichai poems nor the poems of many others whose poetry I love <br />The Biblical poems have been tried <br />The poems of cosmic and scientific reflection <br />I could try to improve them <br />There are too many different kinds of poems to write <br />And I cannot write almost all of them <br />This is another poem about poems and poetry <br />I have written many for a long time now <br />Perhaps I need to go elsewhere and write in a new way <br />A way I have not dreamed or even remotely understood possible before. <br />The poems of the unknown poetry await me <br />I will go on but I am not sure now I know in which wa<br /><br />Shalom Freedman<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-history-poems-have-not-been-written/
