Tuesday, May 1, 2007

Poetry In Motion

“I walk alone, absorbed in my fantastic play, — 
Fencing with rhymes, which, parrying nimbly, back away; 
Tripping on words, as on rough paving in the street, 
Or bumping into verses I long had dreamed to meet.”

-C.B.

Charles Baudelaire roamed the streets of Paris as a flaneur, a wandering poet in search of what we might now call “soft news.” His spleen was enormous. He floated down les avenues awash in absinthe, in a cloud of opium, being rained on by hydrogen and oxygen. A self described combatant, he fenced with the city to win its rhymes. Cities contain fences. Therefore, he might have sometimes fenced with a fence.

Replace “stroll” with “drive”, “the city” with “I-90”, and “poetry” with “blog” and you’ll see that I am exactly the same as Charles Baudelaire. He fenced for poetry, I for funny jokes. We are as one, except that I haven’t written poems called “A Hideous Jewess Lay With Me” and “To She Who Is Too Gay.”

En guarde, America!

5 comments:

BreathePoetry said...

I'm so disappointed that you didn't coin the term "bloggetry". For a minute, I really thought you did. Then I Googled it and discovered, you did not.

Sigh. When are you going to start talking about Johnny Depp again? I like him.

Aaron Kagan said...

As far as I knew, I did coin it!

Aaron Kagan said...

This must mean that someone out there is as smart and clever as me.

BreathePoetry said...

Or it means that you are a copycat and not willing to fess up. ; )

Jocelyn M. Berger said...

Could I be a flaneuse?