[net.poems] Pale Fire

gsmith@brahms.BERKELEY.EDU (Gene Ward Smith) (03/16/86)

     Now I shall speak ... Better than any soap
     Is the sensation for which poets hope
     When inspiration and its icy blaze,
     The sudden image, the immediate phrase
     Over the skin a triple ripple send
     Making the little hairs all stand on end
     As in the enlarged animated scheme
     Of whiskers mowed when held up by Our Cream.


     Now I shall speak of evil as none has
     Spoken before. I loathe such things as jazz;
     The white-hosed moron torturing a black
     Bull, rayed with red; abstractist bric-a-brac;
     Primitivist folk-masks; progressive schools;
     Music in supermarkets; swimming pools;
     Brutes, bores, class-conscious Philistines, Freud, Marx,
     Fake thinkers, puffed-up poets, frauds and sharks.


	John Francis Shade, poet and scholar, 1898-1959.

ucbvax!brahms!gsmith    Gene Ward Smith/UCB Math Dept/Berkeley CA 94720
        Fifty flippant frogs / Walked by on flippered feet
    And with their slime they made the time / Unnaturally fleet.