Writing bad poetry
Many people do. So many people do.

I am humiliated,
but don't I exaggerate now? —

or, yes — I feel humiliated

just by the fact
that it is —
yeah, that this is
poetry. This is poetry. This is poetry.

Did Virgil write bad poetry as well? —

The answer: All great poets
would probably have done it
some time: written poetry this bad. All the major poets,
including
Famous writers such as
Ovid,
Lucan — persons or more accurately SHADOWS [End Page 45]
in that circle of poets
that Dante describes —
it was in the shape of a circle he is describing them, wasn't it? The shape of
     a wheel?

The answer (but who is giving me this answer?) that I AM NOT
ALONE;

I AM NOT ALONE, I AM NOT ALONE . . .

Ovid was too experienced,
Horace
too juvenile. And what
about Joseph Conrad? I am not alone: the shadows are watching me —
and isn't
it so
that they smile at me? That the

Conrad

that described Mr. Jacobus' daughter, the

Schmidt

that described Mr. Jacobi's daughter — both of them will smile . . . But to be
honest there are so many
Conrad and Schmidt,

maybe the reader doesn't know to whom I refer — and
on the other hand I can't be that much more explicit without the
poem becoming so bad that it
will be, I mean what I say, unreadable . . . Schmidt —
yeah, that
was even the name of a Swedish tennis player in the early sixties;
I remember how I took the bus
to Marieheman, in the sunshine dazzling white suburb east of UmeÂ,
to some friends of my parents, Tore and Ulla-Britt, to
watch a Davis Cup match with Uffe —
that was his name — Uffe Schmidt, I believe our TV was broken
or whatever happened? Did they show the match on channel 2
and our family didn't have channel 2? — yeah, there's a WHOLE LOT OF
     STUFF
you just don't remember. [End Page 46]
That THESE SHADOWS seemed to smile —
especially since one of them,
the — not blind, where did they get that from? — deaf Homer. He was
deaf. Yes, he
was deaf . . . And that now the deaf Homer by the end of the Iliad,
just because he feels like it, just because his self-confidence
is so great, writes something down that he himself
perceives as bad: something like Abre Se Ken
Habe Si. — I myself don't know any Greek. In a fancied Homeric Greek
I imagine "Abre Se Ken Habe Si . . ."
Not being alone writing
this bad poetry.

Me writing this poem about A Funny News Item: the findings
a scientist in Tokyo, Hideo Nishioka, was to have published. The last
page of Expressen approximately five years ago. — That's right! It says 1990
     up in the
left corner. You can also catch a glimpse of some temperature information
on the ripped out half of the last page: in Sweden
the coldest 20 degrees below and the warmest 5 degrees. Then it must
have been in the winter, I would guess December '90, the week before
     Christmas . . . yes
I imagine how I, having looked up from Expressen,
peered out through a window: there was actually some Christmas spirit.
In the apartment building across the street you could see two and — as
     I leaned forward,
below me to the right — yet another three illuminated stars. — In three
     adjacent
windows. It was by then I recalled not remembering the exact numbers,
had once again looked down at the news item in Expressen: That's right!
Nishiokas statistical inquiry showed among other things
that
female Japanese students on average used
12 1/2 meters of toilet paper a day, more than three times the males,
what does the parenthesis say? — 3 1/2 meters . . . This that I am
     writing right
now, that I know is bad — and that I, irrespective of how I
elaborate it, never will get right — makes me
feel that I am not alone: NOT ALONE
writing this bad poetry. [End Page 47]
One could of course imagine
that this feeling was REASSURING but this

feeling is not reassuring: almost . . . the opposite . . .

It feels terrible that this
will also apply to . . . Yes, one has to be able to imagine this — Homer,
even he
may nod off, don't they say that even the sun has spots?

— Really. Is that so?
That doesn't feel reassuring does it? Nope.
Is it

thus because perfection
then
is not (YES, BECAUSE THE ONLY THING THAT CAN SAVE YOU
IS OF COURSE PERFECTION) —

it thus depends upon the fact that one
then understands

that
perfection is not, yes but what is it tehn? — human,

that it
is not human,
perfection is not human — o-oo-oo, o oooh