Alternative For goodness' sake, <br />Plead his friends, <br />Cut out the razzmatazz. <br />Make a point and get it across. <br />Use slang. And put some jargon <br />Into your stuff. All right, say some, <br />The keener diagnosticians, <br />Perhaps it's not the gimmicks, <br />But where's your bite, <br />The cerebral edge, there's no <br />Dialectic. What to do? <br />The poet wonders. Strip <br />The Muse, put her on a Suzuki, <br />Make her sputter Hegelian quirks <br />Like all the rest? <br />Or shall I whistle Lillibullero <br />And gae to my Anna? Disquisition on Matters of Principle Later <br />He got his own back, <br />Obliquely, in some of his verse: <br />A mistake his friends, at one <br />With his critics, condemned. <br />Although, on further reflection, <br />A number (of both parties) agreed that <br />From a mere poetological viewpoint <br />It didn't, perhaps, matter, in principle, <br />Whether <br />But rather <br />And that <br />If Drab Prospect These voices, proceeding - whence else? - from the poet's marasm, <br />Keep up their susurrus, annoying the Muses <br />With their dissensions and fuss, obscuring Apollo <br />With interminable logodaedal mist.<br /><br />Alfred Behrmann<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/ars-poetica-4/
