[written in response to a contest calling for "beer-related" poems]
A micro-beer named "Pleasure Dome,"
"solidly alive," labels say.
Getting guys to drink it,
we have a problem akin to modern poetry,
public indifference
in the face of major products.
"It does seem a little like,"
said M.L. Rosenthal in 1950,
"selling democracy to the Germans.
The resistance goes deep."*
Hard times in Xanadu.
* ML Rosenthal, The Nation,
February 16, 1950, p. 20,
a review of Lloyd Frankenberg's
Pleasure Dome, a book about
how to read modern poetry meant
for the general reading public.
Rosenthal was also reviewing
Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies. The
latter book was almost wholly
ignored at the time.