now is the winter of our poetry (1977)

pdf: Now Is The Winter Of Our Poetry

Poem, written 1977, unpublished

Now Is The Winter Of Our Poetry

Knowing:

How to wait

and

How to negate
When to use tact
and
When to act
When to smile When to bite
When to shine in the pitch black night
When to use the transparent door
Of a pompous metaphor
When to mime and When to shout
When to rhyme and When to grate
When to use a nice neat line
And
When to
Break it up

When to scan
and When to swim against the tide of bourgeois poetic rhythm
When to stop writing poetry
And when to live it
(and for you, dear reader,
when are YOU
going to
stop merely reading and word-playing and falling in love with
a nice phrase on a piece of paper and pissing around with
opinions you never do anything with and never doing anything
but?)

Written late 70s probably.