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What Sends Them Harvard Poets

For Langston Hughes

What sends them Harvard poets
I just couldn't do it, Sir: 
What sends them Harvard poets
I just couldn't do it, Sir:
They'll never give me a Pulitzer.

What tickles them Yale poets
Just leaves me sad an' a grievin':
What tickles them Yale poets
Leaves me sad an' a grievin':
Never seen no Birch trees 
On a snowy evenin'.

Then Oxford poets got they poems
An' I gots mine...
So I'll be movin' on, Langston
Movin' down the line....


Michael Ellis

americadiscriminationjudgementmetaphorparodyrhyme

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John Fleming

May 1, 2021 at 7:50 AM

When Ezra Pound was alive and writing poetry he had a very small circulation...people were, in the main, still only reading and appreciating poets like Yeats, Tennyson and Keats. Ezra was different...he studied not just the classics...but also Chinese and Japanese poetry. He came to realize that the Western idea of poetry was too narrow...too confining. He ignored all criticism and slurs and just simply ploughed on. He was without doubt a towering genius!! Love the sentiment expressed here! john

Michael Ellis

May 9, 2021 at 11:39 AM

Thank You. There are so many roadblocks. I knew this at seventeen. I taught myself to write in twelve genres so no one can hinder me. I wanted to write as Black as I could White as male as I could female. I even used multiple names so the light would get through. It was climbing ten mountains to get over one. I was featured in a film on Amazon Prime but no one knows. The Irony. A secret told to myself.