(But maybe we should have this discussion at your blog since we’re hijacking Dave’s comments here – sorry Dave!)

I do have a regularly maintained literary blog which includes my poems (including those I write in response to The Morning Porch and Via Negativa). You are welcome to leave your responses in its Comment link, or cue me to the link where I could follow your own response. It’s at http://ambitsgambit.blogspot.com
and
http://albertbcasuga.blogspot.com
or simply click on the Albert B. Casuga says tag (in blue) of these blogs and you’ll get there.
Thanks for your interest and suggestion.

I’ve seen that Albert often responds with a comment that’s a proper fully-formed poem (unlike mine which was more of a reverential brain-fart).

Albert, I wonder whether it would be worth setting up a poetry blog to feature your work and then leaving a comment linking to a particular work on that blog if something moves you to composition. That way your work wouldn’t exist in the shade of a comments box but would have a proper home all of its own!

And if you left a link here people would be able to follow it and see not only the specific poetic response but also its place in your oeuvre!

Thanks, guys.

Quite so. I was also trying to imitate the jagged lines and rhythm in the four translations I found.

Yes, I read that obit prior to writing my homage—quite a life. Thanks for the poetic comment. You are giving Albert a run for his money!

WE HATE POETS HERE

Love sans irony. It sticks on the craw sometimes
when you least expect the nuance of sincerity.

Have we learned then to obfuscate what we seek
to reveal like the primrose creating claw-like shadows?

We do live in a bleary quonset that is inhospitable
to the clear and transparent, we create our shadows.

There are Babel towers in every ramshackle cottage,
the dumb and the weary are with us to the bitter end.

When this masquerade is over, when the periphrastic
shackles of language are all shorn off our tongues,

we doff our hoods, tear off our masks, and speak
of the feelings we cloak with opaque figures, symbols

of bondage we promised to overcome, speak with the rare
and liquid tongues of angels who call washtubs basins

and flowers simply flowers for the living not the dead,
and like the honchos at the Bronx call a spade a shovel.

Perhaps, then, they would not remind us of how long
we really have languished in our exile from our dreams.

—Albert B. Casuga
06-15-11

I love it too, Dave. Paraplegic angels and all.