23 October 2009

TSE @ UB

In honor of Thomas Sayers Ellis and his reading and thrilling Q & A at the University of Baltimore as part of their MFA Reading Series, one of last night's poems (Hear him read it here, in imitation of the famous Caedmon Recordings)



All Their Stanzas Look Alike

by Thomas Sayers Ellis

All their fences
All their prisons
All their exercises
All their agendas
All their stanzas look alike
All their metaphors
All their bookstores
All their plantations
All their assassinations
All their stanzas look alike
All their rejection letters
All their letters to the editor
All their arts and letters
All their letters of recommendation
All their stanzas look alike
All their sexy coverage
All their literary journals
All their car commercials
All their bribe-spiked blurbs
All their stanzas look alike
All their favorite writers
All their writing programs
All their visiting writers
All their writers-in-residence
All their stanzas look alike
All their third worlds
All their world series
All their serial killers
All their killing fields
All their stanzas look alike
All their state grants
All their tenure tracks
All their artist colonies
All their core faculties
All their stanzas look alike
All their Selected Collecteds
All their Oxford Nortons
All their Academy Societies
All their Oprah Vendlers
All their stanzas look alike
All their haloed holocausts
All their coy hertero couplets
All their hollow haloed causes
All their tone-deaf tercets
All their stanzas look alike
All their table of contents
All their Poet Laureates
All their Ku Klux classics
All their Supreme Court justices
Except one, except one
Exceptional one. Exceptional or not,
One is not enough.
All their stanzas look alike,
Even this, after publication,
Might look alike. Disproves
My stereo types.

From The Maverick Room by Thomas Sayers Ellis (Graywolf Press)

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