Take All The Poems

Take All The Poems

(2004)


Take all the poems that ever got written

And play in the background a drum and bass track

Shout all the words in American accents

Take all the poems and turn them to rap



Take all the people who wrote all the poems

Yes take all the poets and put them on stage

Get them to throw out their arms whilst reciting

A stage-full of poets-cum-rappers-in-age



From Larkin to Hemingway, Camus to Betjeman

Exhume all the corpses and bring them alive

Suspend them from ropes like a theatre of puppets

And shake them around to a Coolio jive



Take all the women like Woolf, Plath and Sexton

Yes, take all the girls with a feminist bent

Bake them profusely with eggs, milk and flour

Then wait until April and eat them for Lent



Burn all the libraries that house all the poetry

Kill all the teachers who lecture the verse

Wash all the students in hot soapy water

Explaining to them that things couldn’t be worse



Load all the Limericks onto a liner

And sail them offshore to a watery grave

Strip all the sonnets of rhyme schemes and couplets

And leave them to rot in a dark coastal cave



Trash all the narrative poems by Milton

Oh, Paradise Lost, may it never be found

Shoot Keats’ nightingale, burn it to cinders

And bury his urn in a hole in the ground



And only when TS hangs high in his Wastelands

With Larkin confronting the purpose of days

‘Tis only now, after poets extinction

That we turn our focus to Shakespeare plays




(copyright: G Knapton)