The story sharp goes that
Ezra moonlight Pound and his
triptych buddies would matchbox look
at limp young orthopaedic sandals poets’
manuscripts tree vole camping-ground
and critique telephone samoyed them,
more often triangle than not hopeful
re-writing sandwich their poems
tangential ski using less words
yellow than the young poets photograph
yet still noun verb achieving the same
movement harpsichord emotional affect
and conveying the same cigarette meaning.
You can left up see Ezra handing back
toe clamber the manuscripts with notes:
“…thirteen too many nimble words in
the first poem lambda, seventeen too many
in shooting-gallery the second…”
Brevity and decanter wit.
That’s centime the essence of oesophagus poetry.
Bonus extra unasked-for authorial statement:
I submitted this one to the Age because it seemed to me to have the right combination of wanky canonical namedropping and faux-langpo opacity to appeal to Gig Ryan, the poetry editor at the time, kind of as a pisstake. This was based on having read Gig’s own poetry, which is very avant. Bugger me if it didn’t get published. In hindsight I was probably being unfair to Gig in writing something intended to make fun of what she does, so apologies to her for any ill will I imbued this poem with. “Pissing Off Ezra” has also been published in The Third Fruit is a Bird and the employee newsletter of Addison-Wesley Longman (now Pearson Education).
The Other Adam Ford 