Lumpy pudding
Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work. Poetry succeeds because all or most of what is said or implied is relevant; what is irrelevant has been excluded, like lumps from pudding and 'bugs' from machinery. (Wimsatt & Beardsley)
Here we celebrate the excluded, lumpy parts of the pudding!
John Berryman - from Nine Dream Songs (Poetry, October 1963)
I
In a motion of night they massed nearer my post.
I hummed a short blues. When the stars went out
I studied my weapons system.
Grenades, the portable rack, the yellow spout
of the anthrax-ray: in order. Yes and most
of my pencils were sharp.
This edge of the galaxy has often seen
a defense so stiff, but it could only go
one way.
— Mr. Bones, your troubles give me vertigo
& backache. Somehow, when I makes your scene,
I made to feel as if
de roses of dawns & pearls of dusks, dreamed up
by some ol writer-man, got right forgot
& the greennesses of showers.
Springwater grow so thick it gonna clot
and pleasing ladies cease. I figger, yup.
you is bad: ours.
(Photo: Terence Spencer, Dublin, 1967)
