"Story Is Not Going Anywhere"

(With no apologies to Bryce Christensen)

Joseph Epstein claimed that poetry
Was killed by poets not writing
On topics ordinary people like.

I.A. Richards wrote in 1926 that poetry
Depends upon a magical view
Of the universe that science is killing.

Pope would disagree. (Blake agree,
At least judging from angels on trees,
"Single vision & Newton's sleep!" )

But air itself can't empty haunted air.
Keats, poor boy with nose on glass
Of sweet shop window, radioed

As well as Marconi, although not
With the self-correcting algorithms
Shannon could have used to fix

The poor boy's confusion re Cortez.
Oh dear, more murdering to redact.
We've lost the topics people ask.

Topics! Is there any topic story
Can't sell, provided a good cast,
A conflict, a faith in causality?

There's your rub, rich boy, fiction,
Sad upon your merchant-class
Imagined, epic-haunted ramparts.

"I have tried lately to read Shakespeare
And found it so intolerably dull
It nauseated me," wrote Darwin,

Recognizing that he was in peril,
Although mistaking his loss as loss
Of Shakespeare's poetry per se. No,

The toxin for the sixty-seven year old
Scientist Darwin was his sense
That contravened a love of fiction.

Causality remained, still his muse, all
The more, all the same. The truth,
Contra either Darwin or Wallace

With his own "little heresy,"
Still adoring and copying verse,
Has nothing to do with rhyme or line.

(And there I got in danger of defying
God, Darwin, Wallace, Blake, Keats,
Pope, Hamlet, toxins and my own,

Unowned and and mythic younger
Self, never my own.)  Causality alone
Is the story, for the story, by stories

Forever advocated. A lack
Of faith in causality, a last,
Zero-point atheism, is the poem

No one, not Darwin confessing
His murders, not Blake hopping mad
At Newton, not Epstein, sad, can own.