SpokenVerse | Looking Back by Michael Cantor (poetry reading) @SpokenVerse | Uploaded March 2012 | Updated October 2024, 2 hours ago.
Reading living poets is fraught with danger: dead poets don't complain anywhere near so much.
The best chance that most poets have of making money is to gain celebrity status. There is very little reward for having poetry published. Celebrity is much more valuable.
When they are famous they will be invited to give talks about poetry - and talking about poetry is much better paid than writing it. They might be offered tenure as Professors of Poetry in some hall of learning. Fame could even lead to immortality and that's no small thing.
I like Michael Cantor's verse, so I decided to venture this sonnet. There might be a problem because he says when I read poetry he can't tell one poet from another: Keats, Bukowski, Whitman - they all sound the same to him.
I suppose there is such a thing as voice-fatigue and over-familiarity. People do get bored with too much of the same thing. Oddly enough, nobody ever says to me in real life "Your voice sounds the same today." They're more likely to mention it when I sound different. For instance, when I have a sore throat, my wife says I sound like Barry White.
Surely though, the poem itself has something to do with it. I doubt whether I am capable of making Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" sound like Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart" or Whitman's "Leaves of Grass".
Michael is good reader himself:
soundzine.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=234:michael-cantor&catid=34:poetry&Itemid=53
The poem is an exploration the wandering husband's spurious escape-clause from the marriage contract and the self-deception that enables him to break his marriage vows.
I'm reminded of Casanova's remark about how in amours the parties deceive one another. A girl knows what she's getting into when she chooses to believe the old cliches: my wife doesn't understand me...we have an open marriage... she does her thing, I do mine...we don't question one another...don't ask, don't tell, that's our policy... Maybe, sometimes, the cliches are true.
People refer to the marriage contract as though it were one immutable agreement. There are commonalities, to be sure, but there are as many marriage contracts as there are marriages. A marriage can differ widely from the norm and yet still work.
The stills are from The Varsity Drag, a film with June Allyson and Peter Lawford.
There was a marriage once where she would paint
from midnight until six a.m., and he
would rise as she slid into bed, and she
would sleep past noon, and wake, and reacquaint
herself with friends, and smile without complaint
as he came home too late each night; and he
was no more bothered by their life than she,
for neither cared that either was no saint.
Or so the story went — the one he told
to women he encountered now and then,
and polished with each use, then used again —
devised to snare the curious or bold.
It worked so well that finally he forgot
which parts of it were true and which were not.
Reading living poets is fraught with danger: dead poets don't complain anywhere near so much.
The best chance that most poets have of making money is to gain celebrity status. There is very little reward for having poetry published. Celebrity is much more valuable.
When they are famous they will be invited to give talks about poetry - and talking about poetry is much better paid than writing it. They might be offered tenure as Professors of Poetry in some hall of learning. Fame could even lead to immortality and that's no small thing.
I like Michael Cantor's verse, so I decided to venture this sonnet. There might be a problem because he says when I read poetry he can't tell one poet from another: Keats, Bukowski, Whitman - they all sound the same to him.
I suppose there is such a thing as voice-fatigue and over-familiarity. People do get bored with too much of the same thing. Oddly enough, nobody ever says to me in real life "Your voice sounds the same today." They're more likely to mention it when I sound different. For instance, when I have a sore throat, my wife says I sound like Barry White.
Surely though, the poem itself has something to do with it. I doubt whether I am capable of making Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" sound like Bukowski's "The Laughing Heart" or Whitman's "Leaves of Grass".
Michael is good reader himself:
soundzine.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=234:michael-cantor&catid=34:poetry&Itemid=53
The poem is an exploration the wandering husband's spurious escape-clause from the marriage contract and the self-deception that enables him to break his marriage vows.
I'm reminded of Casanova's remark about how in amours the parties deceive one another. A girl knows what she's getting into when she chooses to believe the old cliches: my wife doesn't understand me...we have an open marriage... she does her thing, I do mine...we don't question one another...don't ask, don't tell, that's our policy... Maybe, sometimes, the cliches are true.
People refer to the marriage contract as though it were one immutable agreement. There are commonalities, to be sure, but there are as many marriage contracts as there are marriages. A marriage can differ widely from the norm and yet still work.
The stills are from The Varsity Drag, a film with June Allyson and Peter Lawford.
There was a marriage once where she would paint
from midnight until six a.m., and he
would rise as she slid into bed, and she
would sleep past noon, and wake, and reacquaint
herself with friends, and smile without complaint
as he came home too late each night; and he
was no more bothered by their life than she,
for neither cared that either was no saint.
Or so the story went — the one he told
to women he encountered now and then,
and polished with each use, then used again —
devised to snare the curious or bold.
It worked so well that finally he forgot
which parts of it were true and which were not.
