Lines for the Freeport Illinois Happy Wok Fortune Cookies
--after Frank O'Hara
(To be read in cross-check with O'Hara's “Lines for the Fortune Cookies” http://oldpoetry.com/poetry/12348 )
I think you are a fucking prick and so does every other post-avant I know.
Just as Marianne Moore secretly had quadruplets, so did Mina Loy have quadruplets, and the sperm donor in both cases was a raging fascist in Rapallo.
You will meet a short ugly swarthy poet from Afghanistan, and since you are a leading spokesperson of Language poetry you will accept as “necessary” that the far-right wing rulers of your imperial State deliver waves of huge flying machines to pulverize the villages of his extended family.
You will take a long trip into an essay by Christopher Nealon called “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism,” which will confirm what you strongly suspected: In this time of hip Adornean retrenchment, when all the cool kids spend their summer vacations at Camp Messianism, your poetry is completely anachronistic, and you will be, in the end, unpopular and alone.
You will go to bed with the first panelist at Orono who tells you your hiney is special, very large and mysterious.
In the beginning there was THE OTHER—there will always be THE OTHER. Or so says OPRAH, sort of.
You will edit an Authorless book and it will win a MacArthur.
Please e-mail the American Poetry Review immediately: they want to do a centerfold spread of your spread legs of you, thank you.
Helen Vendler and Marjorie Perloff have the hots for you.
Get excited a little: all this hula-hoop Flarf stuff is so much entropy.
Your fantastic poem in Blogger's Poetry Journal will be published as soon as you finish having mutual oral sex with your fellow bloggers.
You may be a bomb at the Poetry Project, but in Stephenson County , you're the most famous barfly poet of all time.
Your farts have a Harry Partch musical quality and their music could get you some Visiting Poet positions, if you can just figure out how to wire your ass for your readings.
You will eat the cake that Kasey baked.
Who do you wish to be, anyway? James Dean's eight-armed Whore-Mother?
You hope your death will be like Ronald Reagan's, but it will really be like Dino Campana's.
A few rounds with the editors of the The Believer and who knows? Probably nothing will happen, but maybe something wonderful will!
That's not a skid mark on your Fruit of the Looms, it's a visual poem by Vito Acconci.
I realize you've gone to school in Providence, and OK, yes, so I realize you know EVERYONE!
You should wear blackface more often—you call people “homey.”
The next poet wailing over your coffin will have a very erotic proposal to make to you.
No one in this Temple of Experimental Poetry wishes they [sic] were you.
Have you been to David Shapiro's reading? The almost-as-good John Ashbery's? The NAMBLA champion Allen Ginsberg's?
At times, your earnestness may seem human and sincere, to non-post-avant NY poets.
Now that the War's over, what are we going to do with Naropa?
You are a prison guard in the Spanish Department at Highland Community College and you are losing your lug nuts and no one quite knows what to do with you.
You drink the piss of Language-Poet. Why do you drink the piss of Language-Poet?
Beyond the edge of Middle Earth there is a Ring, and this Ring is hidden inside the bionic heart valve of Harold Bloom.
You too could experience the following epiphany, breaking open, as you have, this cookie: Poetry exists because the essence of any thing is always incommensurate with its Being.
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