This week’s The New Yorker has an amusing piece on the poetry of Barack Obama in its Talk of the Town.
It contrasts Obama’s lyrical depiction of youthful marijuana usage – “something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory” – to the rather less gripping “I didn’t inhale” of Clinton and “When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible” of Bush.
And it also shares two poems from an 18-year-old Obama that are better than your typical 18-year-old’s:
Pop
Sitting in his seat, a seat broad and broken
In, sprinkled with ashes
Pop switches channels, takes another
Shot of Seagrams, neat, and asks
What to do with me, a green young man
Who fails to consider the
Flim and Flam of the world, since
Things have been easy for me.
And another, which offers, as The New Yorker puts it, “a vivid if obscurely symbolic description of a tribe of submarine primates”:
Underground
Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch
Well, perhaps he should stick to the autobiographical verse. Hilariously, The New Yorker even gets Harold Bloom to comment on them.