Poem in the Modernist Manner
They were cheap but they were real,
the old bistros. You could have a meal,
drink the devil’s own red wine, and contemplate
the sawdust on the floor, or fate,
as the full-fed beast kicked the empty pail.
The conspiracy of the second rate
continued to reverberate.
Everyone wanted to get his licks.
Everyone said it was a steal.
So the girl and I stayed out late.
We walked along the shore
and I campaigned some more.
And the city built with words not bricks
burned like a paper plate.
Copyright @ 2014 by David Lehman. Used with permission of the author.
“‘Poem in the Modernist Manner’ is from a book of poems in progress called Poems in the Manner Of. I began writing the book twelve years ago—on the principle that when I write as if I were someone else, something good may happen. I have written poems in the manner of Cavafy, Neruda, Baudelaire, Holderlin, Rilke, Auden, Mayakovsky, Dorothy Parker, Emerson, Dickinson, Yeats, Frost, Borges, Bukowski, W. C. Williams, Robert Lowell, and ‘Wallace Stevens as rewritten by Gertrude Stein,’ among others. ‘Poem in the Modernist Manner’ sneaks in allusions to Auden and Eliot, and the atmosphere and attitude owe something, I think, to the modernists of the Pound generation.”
—David Lehman
David Lehman
David Lehman is the author of several collections of poems and books of criticism and is also known as a prominent editor, teacher, and literary critic.