Sometimes I feel like my references are too simple, my poems too plain to be worth much more consideration than one reading. However, I see too many poems today by too many intelligent people become too intelligent for their own good. If there is a message you wish to convey, to a simple audience, the simplest way to do it is the best way. Smart writers, I feel, get bogged down too consistently in trying to exhibit their own cleverness; their own abilities. When this happens, the tone, mood, message, climax, structure - everything about the poem is in jeopardy. That is, unless, they are writing for a different audience. If this is the case, then they can be as fearlessly arrogant as they wish.
My initial intention with this blog was to create a place where the world can restore poetry to an art form that is wonderful, beautiful, and still easily accessible and vital to everyone. Of course those goals are a little lofty, considering how impossible it is for even the most powerful people in the world to get people to unite about the simplest of things...but this was my dream nevertheless.
Poetry has become too exclusive. It has become a sanctity reserved for only those who think they are smart enough to use it. It is the most upsetting thing about poetry today to me.
But let's forget all that for now. This place is for me. I will treat it that way.
So now, I will put up another poem, simple in its construction, but still poetically justified.
His One Night
by Matt Catania
A boy was born this night
My boy
With freedom in his eyes
Near wrecked
Ripped from his mother
Mottled with blood
Ready to ascend
his crystal stair.
You remember that night well
The celestial ocean split apart
wave upon wave rushing aside
to open the universe
I left the ward
went outside
to call to them
for him
Bursts of light reached across the sky -
- Such lights!
The stars burned with reckless abandon -
- A chorus of lights!
I called to them
cried for him
they carried his name
to where it burns forever:
you remember it well -
remember that night well
for Inside I found my woman alive
where tears shatter peace –
where free eyes
never see again
You remember it well
remember that night well
the night the heavens carried his name
my boy’s name
to where it burns forever…
in the heavens
and the heavens alone.
