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And
yet poems remind me of the gentle Tasaday who some
regard merely as members of another tribe taught to fool anthropologists
with false primitiveness and naiveté, to be blunt
in their manners and
infernally innocent. No one is sure, as with poems, whether
they are real or
a hoax, whether the dictator, in his munificence, created a
forest preserve
to shelter them as he might set aside an apartment for a poet
in the palace.
Forests and palaces, such utopias are mostly exclusionary, like
hotels for the
rich, and needn't concern us. It is rainy for a rain forest
to house our myths,
to shelter our lost tribes, who, one by one, gather in a clearing.
I sometimes
think about my lost tribe of Jews, American Jews, also part
hoax and part
invention, whose preserve is sheltered under brick where limousines
hum
and one hears the faint, familiar babble of the homeless. As
it happens, the
Tasaday are being declared "non-existent" by government
scientists so their
hardwood forests can be transformed into chests of drawers.
Strange, then,
the anthropology of the poet who must build his poems out of
the myths
he intends to falsify, who says, look my friend, you are laying
away your
laundered shirts in a rain forest.
--Michael Heller
(published in Wordflow Jersey City, New Jersey:
Talisman Press, 1997)
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Pulsar
by Gene Frumkin
Poem
For My 60th Birthday
by Dick Allen
Now
That I Know What Feverfew Looks Like
by Elaine Equi
South
America
by Tom Raworth
Words
of Wisdom
by Mark Pawlak
The
Art of Poetry
by Bobby Byrd
Some
Anthropology
by Michael Heller
The
Reality Executive
by James V. Cervantes
Those
Sunday Afternoons
by Charles O. Hartman
The
News from Mars
by Wendy Battin
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