RAYMOND QUENEAUSomeday I’ll sing Ulysses or maybe Achilles
Aeneas or maybe Dido Quixote maybe Sancho
Someday I’ll sing pleasures the idle know
the fun of fishing or the peace of villas
All fagged out today by the hours as they wind out
trudging like an old nag around the dial
a thousand pardons from this skull—a ball—
for doling out plaintively this song of the void
—keith waldrop
The Nourishment of Little Birds
‘‘The plantain is
a species of very common
plant whose seed serves as
nourishment for
little birds’’
plantain seed is
plant serves as
little birds us
the plantain is vegetal
and rather banal
and for poets is capable of serving them
as occasion for a po-em
one day across the fields walked a sacristan
for his little birds he searched for plantain
‘‘in the house of Gamopetallate
superovaried, bicarpellate
the little family of Plantaginacae
is very di≈cult to place’’
We find both these tirade(s)
in Larousse and Pléiade
The love of little birds
doesn’t halt the love of words
—teo savory