Most times I plan what to do for poetry club on my plan, the day of poetry club, if I have time to plan at all. This last week I was looking for a sestina, because I wanted to end with this prompt from Ben Niespodziany, which calls for intentionally messing up a poetic form. By the way, this is a plug for Ben’s Sunday Poem + Prompt newsletter. So I looked around for sestinas and found this one called “Beautiful Poetry” by Camille Guthrie. Here is the line that fully sold me on this poem; it is someone saying, presumably to the poet,

                                       Stop this wasteful life.

Doctor, lawyer, thief. These fancies of yours could cost a life
or worse, two.

Do the parents of, the responsible adults around, young people who want to grow up to be oil company CEOs or political lobbyists say to them, “Stop this wasteful life. These fancies of yours could cost something beautiful, or worse, two”?

We didn’t really discuss or analyze this poem together, other than to highlight a few lines we liked before moving on to another poetic form, but it’s been bouncing around in my head for the past few days.

The day after her death, her murder, we read a poem by Renée Good. Yesterday, in the same city, another murder. What tomorrow?

Again from “Beautiful Poetry,” published in 2011:

All the brute indifference, humiliation, and failure can put one
    in the   
         mind
to give up, freak out, kill somebody, heart battered, so mastered.

I think of goons, of their indifference, their humiliation, a humiliation they want to inflict on others, their failure, their hearts battered, mastered. I’m not going to psychoanalyze or poeticize them. I have never known anyone, regardless of intelligence, upbringing, religion, who doesn’t ultimately know right from wrong. That there are so many people who willingly choose wrong is alarming, sad, maybe unsurprising. That there are so many more people willing to stand up for what is right, even as government goons appear empowered to kill them, is beautiful. I want to believe that a better world is possible; at the very least we can’t let them make this world any worse.

Yes, poetry is nice and often beautiful,
yet it doesn’t beget much attention, money, or even a simple thanks
for placing the best words in the best order.

I don’t think poetry can save us. Only we can do that. But it is anything but wasteful.

This is supposed to be a newsletter for promoting books, but I don’t feel like promoting books this morning.

Always remember these words of beautiful poetry from Percy Shelley. Tattoo them on your heart.

"Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number—
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you—
Ye are many—they are few."