Sunday, February 12, 2012

"Cankles and haunch"

I have been somewhat sloppy of late about reading Poetry Daily but fortunately did not miss this gem:


Sex Rubenesque
 
           Unleash the excess!
     Bring me cleavage and rumpage,
one heftable breast, then another,
     a buttock untrussed
and rhapsodic for humpage.
     Begin the maneuvers,

  purge girdles and covers; undress
    each strumpet of frumpage
  that revolts a fat lover. Release the noblesse,
the cankles and haunch, trot out the lumpage—
            Deliver the flesh!

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Naturally delighted to find a contemporary poet so precisely to my taste. Among other good poems of Leithauser's that I have dug up are: "The Old Woman Gets Drunk with the Moon", "O, She Says", "Frostbite", "UFOs", "Was you ever bit by a dead bee?", and "Guidelines: Writing the Sonnet." (Some of these are perhaps a little too much like Kay Ryan -- "Tiger Shark" absolutely is -- but there are worse things.) There isn't, as far as I can tell, a book of any kind out yet, but I hope there will soon be one.

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While I'm at it, I should link to the (very slightly related) youtube clip of MacNeice reading "Bagpipe Music."

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