WPA Poetics

WPA Poetics
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“DO SOMETHING”
—Amiri Baraka,
“Cultural Revolution
and the Literary Canon,”
Disembodied Poetics

I was in love—
With Ahmos ZuBolton
But he was in love
With Somebody else

I’d never met—
Anybody like him
A poetry dude who
Lived and wrote it

He was in love—
With poetry and
Poetry was is love
With him real bad
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Allen Hall at LSU—
Was Dis the Capitol
Chattel slave Empire
On campus back then

New Criticism ruled—
The Southern Agrarian
Movement solipsistic
And racially elitist

Robert Penn Warren—
Taught at LSU and
Preached a chauvinistic
Southern Sermonette
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The Delta Muse—
For Miss Tate, Ransom,
Miss Brooks & Warren =
Dixie Drag Greek Attic

This so-called Diva—
Madame New Lit Crit
Was just the same old
Plantation jive for me

Painstakingly whitey—
Highly closeted, mannered
And cold as a Witch’s Tit
With cotton field poetics
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ZuBolton was one of—
The first black young men
Permitted to walk on the
Newly desegregated campus

Tempers flared when he—
Pressed for new poetry to be
Taught rather than the same
Old butchy Hemingway jive

The shocked professor—
In our creative writing class
Was aghast at such a new
African-American revolt!
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But the Black & Gay Arts—
Movement kept growing
From the Harlem Renaissance
Forward to Black Mountain

The old literary canon—
Accreted and selfishly
Self-aggrandized by the
Southern Aristocrats failed

Even though MLK—
JFK, RFK, Malcolm X and
The Kingfish of Louisiana
Were assassinated
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Goebbelsmania—
Global protofascism
Gas chamber logic
Goosestepping world

Southern plantation—
Sutpen supremacists
Slick supercilious racism
Still thrives, survives

Banana Republic jive—
Pinochet Planet agitprop
So much for gay rights
And then came the plague
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But even so—
The muse was in-motion
Everything moving fast in
Mother-fucking English

And amidst all that—
I fell in love with this
Young grandson of a slave
Who freed me back then