Those noisy sloganeers! I can resist them,

shouting displeasure into microphones,

their rhymes compulsive, unprosodical:

they like me not. As the kids say: hard pass.

Give me the tepid graybeards, pale and stooped,

the moderate, the British, and the stiff:

martini-prone Old Guard, sherry rhymesters,

'30s enfants terribles tamed by age.*

Give me a silver-pate grammarian

of Roethkean agility and wit.

Give me the flash and gleam of Wallace Stevens,

his Rubik-like inscrutability,

give me Miss Dickinson and Dylan Thomas,

Elizabeth, perhaps, and Marianne.

++++++++++

*Looking at you, Uncle Wystan [W. H. Auden]!