Caws Radio

the poem.

Here at Oregon State there is a "student art and literary magazine" called Prism which comes out every term. Needless to say, it isn't very impressive. It is about 80% poetry, because writing poems is cheap and for some reason there is apparently no standard for bad poetry. The rest of the thing is usually photography, with subjects ranging from nature to children to old people to...nature again. Most of the photos are black and white because a color photograph must not count as "art".
As I was wading through the pretentious, awkwardly sexual poetry in last term's Winter issue, I noticed that a couple poets kept popping up again and again. This led me to think "I guess they don't get many submissions." This further led me to think "maybe I should submit something. If they put in five works by this girl, they can put in one work by me."
Seeing as how the Prism peeps loved poetry so much, I decided to play their game and write a poem. My friend pointed out that pretty much every poem in the magazine was about sex, and she was quite right. Page after page of waking up next to someone and admiring their eyes and then feeling their heat from the inside out and oh my god I don't want to know any more. So my poem had to be fresh. None of this sexual symbolism or personal catharsis; my poem had to be whimsical and colorful, a parade of words. The only way to intrigue people these days is to first confuse them, so goes my theory on bad art (which I will discuss on a later date). Somewhat inspired by the speech of disorganized schizophrenics, which I was learning about in abnormal psychology, I wrote my poem and submitted it to Prism to be used in their Fall issue. A few days later they emailed me a rejection. Here is the poem:

Generous, pt. II: the Streams of Formalism

Georgie old boy, hand me the summit
Of Artemis.
Cheeky and flat, radiates feeling that
Solely resides in a crumb.

High above anything bubbly
Here comes the hot rod to sing
"We'll be making our way past the bronze doors,
We'll be making our way without guilt."
Fools
I'll still be drinking my lemonade roller blade scotch.
When the time comes, and the lights go down
Ear-shear party with Bosch!

Later at the bridge she'll drink a Coke
And recite twenty lines of poetry
While he wishes she was stupider.
All of his friends wear space helmets
And we fish down at the streams
And we wade in formal waters
And we sell our vulgarities.

Diamond gardens enjoy fledgling pink trumpets,
A peanut knife hidden in a box of salt.

Let the kids abuse themselves
Let the kids amuse themselves
Let the kids cast off the wet sugar ropes
That you got from your forefathers' attic.
Because when we get crazy we like to be pretty
When we get pretty we wind up in gutters...

...Until we wake up in Tokyo land,
and we wait for the fuzzy plastic beast to
take us back to Laforet in his warm arms.

I can't say I am disappointed. Hell, looking back I can't believe that I actually thought they would accept it. But it is a bit of a shame.

(by the way: Laforet)