Ars Poetica

by Howard Winn

To the right of me loom neo-formalists,
rigor in their cheeks,
cash behind their checks,
anthologies in their bank accounts,
sonnets in their privates,
endowed academic chairs
cradling their comfortable butts,
cozying up to the politicians
who fund the Humanities;
to the left, the spewers of on-the-spot brain waves,
still mourning Ginsberg
and Kerouac.
Fragments of thought crash
against the arrangement of forms,
like waves coming to shore at Montauk
and volumes of verse
are left stranded at the high tide line
as spindrift.