Author: Linda Sue Grimes

The Poetaster

His poetastry sucked long before he wrote one line.
His windbag approach to speech spews forth
Rorschach gibberish, a kite loose in the wind.

He strings together bilge & blather in prosy, broken lines.
Each syllable a sin against language, he sounds
Like a broken record swimming in a thesaurus cesspool.

To him and his ilk, meaning is a four-letter word
A limitation that blasts his own thing
Cramps his style, like hippies against the Man.

Dead poets scald him in their perfection
He’s not only jealous, he’s incredulous
That anyone could really write a poem

His shyster ways are blistering ego trips
Laid on the gullible who never have cared
To understand or appreciate what poetry is

He’s the man behind the curtain
At the end of yellow bricking
Fanning his flame to fame.

A different version focusing on the same theme as this poem appears in my collection titled Turtle Woman & Other Poems.

A Prose Commentary on My Original Poem “The Poetaster”

In my poem “The Poetaster,” I have delivered a speaker, who delivers a blow with a pointed critique of a fraudulent artist—someone who takes on the guise of a poet without submitting to the discipline, humility, or responsibility that poetry demands. 

The poem functions as both satire and indictment, using abrasive diction and exaggerated imagery to reveal the hollowness of pretension masquerading as creativity. In my humble artist opinion, human creativity is the most cherished possession held by the human heart and mind.  

(Human creativity has resulted in some of humanity’s most important discoveries and inventions, making life on earth both comfortable, profitable, and inspirational.  To degrade that human function with laughable, disgusting, idiotic fakery remains an abomination that corrodes the human spirit, as it mocks God and pretends to superiority it does not deserve.)

The term “poetaster” itself signals the speaker’s purpose: it is not merely a label for bad poetry but for imitation without substance. The speaker approaches the subject with sharpened disdain, defending the integrity of poetry against those who dilute it.

The language throughout is deliberately coarse—“windbag,” “bilge & blather,” “cesspool”—so that the revulsion is tangible. This discourse has no intention of remaining a polite literary critique; it is exposure. At the same time, the imagery is controlled, each metaphor reinforcing the disorder and emptiness that define the poetaster’s work.

First Stanza: Inherent Failure

The speaker opens by asserting that the poetaster’s failure precedes even the act of writing: “His poetry sucked long before he wrote one line.” The hyperbole suggests that the deficiency is fundamental, not merely technical.

The description “Rorschach gibberish, a kite loose in the wind” emphasizes randomness and lack of control. A Rorschach blot invites projection rather than meaning, while the loose kite suggests motion without direction. These images mark the poetaster as untethered, someone whose language drifts without intention.

Second Stanza: Abuse of Language

Here, the speaker focuses on the poetaster’s relationship to language. The phrases “bilge & blather” and “prosy, broken lines” highlight excess without purpose, the superficial adoption of form without discipline.

The simile “like a broken record swimming in a thesaurus cesspool” underscores repetition, artificiality, and overreliance on inflated diction. The poetaster does not shape language; he wallows in it. The speaker intends to convey that such writing actively degrades the medium it purports to serve.

Third Stanza: Rejection of Meaning

The third stanza identifies the poetaster’s central flaw: a willful rejection of meaning. “Meaning is a four-letter word” frames clarity and coherence as constraints.  

(Scenario:   One imagines the poor, teenage would-be poetaster sitting in high school English class, unable to ferret out the “meaning” of a line of verse, thus becoming convinced that meaning belongs to the elite, the teacherish class alone can understand “meaning.”  Meaning shmeaning, the hell with that: words, words, words—that’s all I need for my poem.)

The comparison to “hippies against the Man” introduces cultural satire, suggesting reflexive rebellion without depth. The poetaster mistakes the absence of structure for freedom. The speaker implies that true poetry wrestles with meaning, whereas the poetaster abdicates it.  Meaning—also one of the great necessities for living a decent life on this mud ball of a planet.  To abdicate it is to abdicate life itself!

Fourth Stanza: Envy of the Canon

The speaker turns to the poetaster’s relation to literary tradition. “Dead poets scald him in their perfection” conveys both intimidation and resentment. The poetaster cannot reconcile himself to genuine mastery.  Remember that teeny-bopper, would be poet sitting in the high school class, befuddled by the Greats!

His incredulity—“That anyone could really write a poem”—reveals insecurity. If real poetry exists, his own efforts are exposed as inadequate. Rather than aspiring to that standard, he dismisses it. Envy here becomes corrosive, curdling into denial rather than inspiring growth.

Fifth Stanza: Manipulation and Audience

The critique expands to include the poetaster’s audience. The “shyster ways” and “blistering ego trips” indicate a performative dimension: this performance is opportunism, not craft.  

The poetaster relies on “the gullible who never have cared / To understand or appreciate what poetry is.” The speaker thus implicates the audience as complicit in perpetuating mediocrity. The poetaster survives not only through ego but through uncritical reception; he has become a sacred cow, impervious to criticism.

Sixth Stanza: Illusion of Grandeur

In the final stanza, the speaker employs imagery of spectacle and deception. “The man behind the curtain” evokes false authority, manipulating appearances to maintain influence. The reference to “yellow bricking” recalls a journey toward supposed revelation that leads instead to exposure—obvious allusion to The Wizard of Oz.

“Fanning his flame to fame” captures the poetaster’s self-promotional drive. The flame is ambition and vanity, maintained artificially rather than earned. The poem concludes without redemption: the poetaster remains what he is, sustained by ego and illusion.

An Afterthought

In “The Poetaster,” the speaker articulates a broader frustration with a cultural condition in which performance substitutes for substance and standards erode. The poem is intentionally harsh because the stakes are real: poetry, at its best, refines language, sharpens perception, deepens understanding, leading to spiritual rebirth for the human heard and mind. 

When poetry is reduced to empty display, vitally essential human progress is lost.The speaker, therefore, does not merely condemn; she defends—aggressively—the possibility that poetry can and must still demand rigor, clarity, and truth.

A Memory of a Mind

for a respected professor

My heat runs near my heart
Gathering blooms like daylilies
In the staunch atmosphere of breath.
Somewhere a mockingbird is plying
His abundant score of tunes.
I listen, an ocean far away washes in.

My childish wisdom plays dark tones
Where no one bothers to intrude.
I have created my shelter with roses
& sweet notions that cling to my ears.
Summer strives with more sunshine
Than evil dares to counter.

My thoughts flow down river
Swaying like tulips in a spring breeze.
You offered me balm from the blight
Of crooked logic that streams from ignorance.
Coiffed rhetoric pours acid on tumors
Growing in idle, pampered brains.

You played your role imperfectly,
But I benefited from the jazzed up wisdom
Slipping out from your tangled sentences.
Now that you cohabit with a confuddled communist,
Her codswallop will stunt your mental growth—
Still your mind will one day bask in freedom.

A Prose Commentary on My Original Poem “A Memory of a Mind”

In my poem “A Memory of a Mind,” I fashion a speaker who reflects upon intellectual formation, gratitude, disillusionment, and the fragile persistence of independent thought. The poem operates as both tribute and critique, addressed to a once-respected mentor whose influence remains formative, though not untroubled. 

I rely on organic and musical imagery—flowers, rivers, birdsong, jazz—to explore the shaping of consciousness, while also introducing harsher, almost corrosive metaphors to examine the distortions of thought imposed by ideology and careless reasoning.

The speaker’s voice is at once reflective and evaluative, moving between reverence and judgment. As in an earlier poem “Downstream,” I favor a density of figurative language that merges the sensory with the intellectual: breath becomes atmosphere, thought becomes landscape, and rhetoric becomes a physical toxin. 

The philosophical undercurrent remains concerned with the tension between clarity and confusion, wisdom and corruption, freedom and constraint—an interior drama enacted within the evolving mind.

As I usually do in my poems and other creative works, I remain aware of the pairs of opposites, discussed and explained by my blessed Guru, Paramahansa Yogananda.  The tension between those pairs is always operative on this mud ball of planet, and my speakers are steeped in that realization.

First Stanza: Awakening Sensibility and the Music of Distance

The opening stanza situates the speaker in a state of heightened inward awareness. “My heat runs near my heart” suggests both vitality and emotional immediacy, while the blooming “daylilies” evoke transient beauty—fleeting but recurrent. The “staunch atmosphere of breath” implies a disciplined, almost meditative interiority, where even respiration becomes deliberate and meaningful.

The introduction of the mockingbird, “plying / His abundant score of tunes,” extends the poem into the auditory realm. This figure embodies both natural creativity and excess—an improvisational intelligence that parallels the workings of the mind. 

Yet the speaker does not fully inhabit this immediacy; instead, “an ocean far away washes in.” This distance signals a dual consciousness: one part present and attentive, another removed, reflective, and expansive.

Thus the stanza establishes the central dynamic of the poem: the mind as both participant in and observer of experience, capable of intimacy yet inclined toward detachment.

Second Stanza: The Construction of Inner Refuge

In the second stanza, the speaker turns inward more deliberately, recalling a “childish wisdom” that “plays dark tones / Where no one bothers to intrude.” This phrase captures an early intellectual solitude—an imaginative space untested by external critique but rich with private meaning. The darkness here is not wholly negative; it suggests depth, secrecy, and the unrefined beginnings of thought.

The “shelter with roses & sweet notions” represents a self-fashioned sanctuary, built from aesthetic pleasure and comforting ideas. Yet there is an implicit fragility in such construction: roses, while beautiful, are perishable, and “sweet notions” may lack rigor. 

The stanza’s closing lines—“Summer strives with more sunshine / Than evil dares to counter”—introduce a provisional optimism, where light appears to dominate darkness. Still, the phrasing (“strives”) hints that this balance is not guaranteed; it must be maintained against encroaching forces.

Here, I am acknowledging the formative illusions of youth: necessary, perhaps, but ultimately insufficient when confronted with more complex realities.  A corrupted adulthood often confounds the complexities that later snap and struggle in the confusion of time as it relates to space.

Third Stanza: Intellectual Guidance and the Critique of Corruption

The third stanza marks a turning point, introducing the addressed figure more directly. The speaker’s thoughts “flow down river,” suggesting maturation—movement shaped by gravity and terrain rather than mere whim. The comparison to “tulips in a spring breeze” retains a softness, but now this motion is guided.

“You offered me balm from the blight / Of crooked logic that streams from ignorance” positions the mentor as a corrective force. The metaphor of “balm” implies healing, while “blight” evokes disease spreading through faulty reasoning. At this stage, the professor represents clarity, a defense against intellectual decay and kuuntzian* buffoonery .

However, the stanza quickly darkens: “Coiffed rhetoric pours acid on tumors / Growing in idle, pampered brains.” The imagery becomes aggressive and surgical.

“Coiffed rhetoric” suggests language that is polished but superficial, while the “acid” both destroys and reveals. The “tumors” symbolize entrenched ignorance, particularly in minds that are “idle” and “pampered”—unused to discipline or challenge.

This stanza thus captures a dual process: the possibility of intellectual healing through guidance, and the simultaneous presence of corrosive discourse that threatens genuine understanding.

Fourth Stanza: Imperfect Influence and the Persistence of Hope

In the final stanza, the speaker adopts a more measured, retrospective tone. “You played your role imperfectly” acknowledges the mentor’s limitations, rejecting any idealization. Yet this imperfection does not negate value: “I benefited from the jazzed up wisdom / Slipping out from your tangled sentences.”

The metaphor of jazz is crucial here—improvised, irregular, sometimes chaotic, yet capable of producing unexpected insight. Wisdom emerges not from pristine clarity but from complexity, even confusion.

The poem then introduces a note of critique bordering on satire: “Now that you cohabit with a confuddled communist, / Her codswallop will stunt your mental growth.” The language is deliberately sharp, even colloquial, signaling the speaker’s frustration with what is perceived as ideological distortion. The shift in tone underscores a loss—not only of the mentor’s intellectual independence but of the clarity once admired.

Yet the poem does not conclude in bitterness. “Still your mind will one day bask in freedom” restores a measure of hope. The speaker ultimately affirms the possibility of intellectual liberation, even after error or misalignment. 

This closing gesture aligns with the broader philosophical stance evident throughout the poem: that the mind, though vulnerable to confusion and influence, retains an inherent capacity for renewal and clarity.

A Closing Reflection

In “A Memory of a Mind,” I attempt to trace the evolution of consciousness as it moves from youthful inwardness, through formative mentorship, into a more critical and autonomous stance. The poem resists both naïve reverence and outright condemnation; instead, it holds both gratitude and disappointment in tension.

The central belief underlying this work is that intellectual and spiritual growth are inseparable from conflict—between clarity and confusion, influence and independence, admiration and discernment. The mind, like a river or a piece of music, is never static. It is shaped by forces both internal and external, yet it retains the capacity to reorient itself toward truth.

In this sense, the poem affirms a disciplined optimism: that even amid imperfect guidance and ideological distortion, the individual consciousness can, with effort and discernment, return to a state of freedom.

*kuuntzian:  a perennially flawed, shadowy, malevolent mindset (I coined this term prompted by the pathetic machinations of a Ball State University professor, whom I hope to save from embarrassment by not spelling out his name)

Downstream

for a belovèd Professor

Maybe I crept too near my own heat
Burned my own logic into everyday issues
But when I looked for your face
I looked for what every child needs
From a mother, and from God.
And you smiled when I offered my childish wisdom
On matters that were already folded
And neatly tucked away in the bureau of your mind.

Once there was a time I thought
I lost a friend of great value.
But Paper Mill Bridge
From which I watched summer canoe downstream
And fall send ships of leaves downstream
And winter float chunks of ice downstream
Taught me, as you teach me now,
That the flow is downstream—
Thought, friend, value—all flowing downstream.
All things, all time, downstream
Until we all empty into the open ocean
Until we all flow empty into the mind of God.

A Prose Commentary on My Poem “Downstream”

In my poem “Downstream,” I create a speaker who is musing with measured candor on attachment, misperception, and the gradual acceptance of spiritual humility. The controlling metaphor of the poem is the downstream current.

That important metaphor reflects steadiness, indifference, as well as ultimate unity, through which all human experience, whether intellectual, emotional, or relational, is carried toward unification with a larger, Divine Consciousness. 

The tone remains restrained, even when approaching confession, and the language is deliberately plainspoken, allowing the philosophical weight to emerge through image rather than ornament.

At its core, the poem concerns a misalignment of expectation: the speaker’s attempt to locate in another person—specifically, a “belovèd Professor”—a form of nurture or transcendence that properly belongs elsewhere. What emerges is not bitterness but correction, and ultimately, a subdued gratitude.

First Movement: Projection, Heat, and Misplaced Longing

In the opening lines, the speaker begins with self-suspicion: “Maybe I crept too near my own heat.” Her “heat” suggests both intellectual intensity and emotional overinvestment. The speaker recognizes that in pressing too closely to her own convictions—her “logic”—she has distorted their proper application, “burning” them into domains where they do not belong, namely “everyday issues.”

The poem then shifts into a quiet admission of need. When the speaker “looked for your face,” she was not merely seeking intellectual guidance, but something more primal: “what every child needs / From a mother, and from God.” 

The pairing here is deliberate and revealing. The professor becomes, in the speaker’s perception, a composite figure of paternal authority and divine presence—an impossible fusion that guarantees disappointment, not because the professor fails, but because the expectation itself is miscast.

Yet the professor’s response is neither rejection nor indulgence. His smile, directed at the speaker’s “childish wisdom,” carries a measured patience. He recognizes both the sincerity and the immaturity of the offering. 

His mind, described as a “bureau” where matters are already “folded / And neatly tucked away,” suggests order, experience, and containment. In contrast, the speaker’s thought remains provisional—still forming, still seeking validation.  

The first movement, then, is not accusatory but diagnostic. The speaker identifies her own error: she has confused intellectual admiration with existential dependence.  But she, no doubt, intends to correct her misbegotten mistake.

Second Movement: The Bridge and the Instruction of Time

The poem’s second stanza introduces the central image: “Paper Mill Bridge.” The location functions as both a literal and symbolic vantage point. From this fixed position, the speaker observes the continuity of change across seasons—summer canoes, autumn leaves, winter ice—all moving “downstream.”

The repetition of this motion across temporal variations establishes a principle: while forms differ, the direction remains constant. The downstream flow becomes a visual analogue for time itself, as well as for the procession of human attachments and valuations.

Initially, the speaker frames her insight through personal loss: “Once there was a time I thought / I lost a friend of great value.” The phrasing is precise—“I thought”—because it signals revision. What was once experienced as loss is now understood as transition within a larger movement. 

The bridge, and by extension the professor, “taught” the speaker that nothing is truly lost in isolation; rather, all things participate in a continuous passage beyond possession.

The professor’s role here is restrained but decisive. He does not impose doctrine; instead, he stands as a figure whose presence aligns with the observable order of things. “As you teach me now” suggests that her instruction is ongoing and perhaps indirect, mediated through the speaker’s own disciplined observation.

Third Movement: Universal Flow and Spiritual Resolution

In the final lines, the metaphor expands from the personal to the universal. The downstream motion comes to include “Thought, friend, value—all flowing downstream.” The accumulation is deliberate: intellectual constructs, emotional bonds, and systems of worth are all subjected to the same current.

The progression culminates in a metaphysical conclusion: all things “empty into the open ocean,” and further, “into the mind of God.” The ocean serves as an intermediary image—vast, undifferentiated, absorptive—before the final identification with Divine Consciousness.

Importantly, the speaker does not present her realization of this natural act as a dramatic revelation but as a quiet acceptance. The repetition of “all” underscores inevitability rather than triumph. 

Even the phrase “flow empty” carries a dual implication: it suggests both depletion (a relinquishing of individual claim) and purification (a release from the strain of attachment and misvaluation).

An After-Thought: From Projection to Right Relation

What the poem ultimately records is a movement from projection to right relation. The speaker begins by seeking to locate absolute meaning—parental, divine, and intellectual—in a single human figure. 

She ends by recognizing that meaning is not contained within any one person but disclosed through process, time, and disciplined perception.  She also comes to understand that all such action is divinely guided.

The downstream current becomes both corrective and stabilizing. It denies permanence but affirms continuity; it dissolves possession while preserving participation in a larger whole.

The professor, in the speaker’s revised understanding, is neither diminished nor idealized. He is clarified. No longer burdened with symbolic excess, he remains what he is: a learned, composed presence whose distance and restraint allow the speaker to reorient herself toward a more valuable understanding of reality.

The poem’s restraint is essential to its effect. I have tried to avoid dramatization in favor of steady articulation. The central insight—that all things move downstream—carries the full weight of the poem’s philosophical claim without rhetorical excess.