My Most Recently Published Poem... — The David M. Katz Poetry Blog

is my vainglorious attempt to capture our execrable zeitgeist, and the dubiousness of any such attempt, in a Shakespearian sonnet. (If I sound bilious—or delirious—I am only just now recovering from a bout of Covid-19.)

Despite my lack of humility, I want to express deep gratitude to Alyssa Yankwitt and Christopher Cappelluti, the fine new editors of BigCityLit, for publishing my poem “To the Age,” which I’m reprinting below. Under their leadership, BCL, already an excellent online journal, is undergoing a renaissance. I especially salute its Statement of Editorial Policy, which contains a brave and much needed declaration of literary independence, especially the editors’ attribution of “paramount significance to artistic merit.” Even more forcefully, they vow to “decline work which in our estimation subverts art to agenda, political or otherwise[.]”

God save poetry from the many who are currently subverting our sacred art to troglodyte agendas! Here is the first paragraph of BCL’s policy statement.

“The editors attach paramount significance to artistic merit and diversity of expression.
Merit notwithstanding, we will decline work which in our estimation subverts art to agenda, political or otherwise; diversity of expression is circumscribed by settled principles of U.S. First Amendment and analogous foreign jurisprudence and further by editorial discretion.”

As to my poem “To the Age,” which I’m reprinting below, I think of it as having two sources. The first is a phrase from “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” Ezra Pound’s 1920 excoriation of his own age, that has been in my brain since my early twenties: “The age demanded.” To personify and encompass the age in that way struck me as a bold stance for a poet to take, even for someone as bold as Pound. Here’s the section of Mauberly in which the phrase appears:

The age demanded an image
Of its accelerated grimace,
Something for the modern stage,
Not, at any rate, an Attic grace;

Not, not certainly, the obscure reveries
Of the inward gaze;
Better mendacities
Than the classics in paraphrase!

The "age demanded" chiefly a mould in plaster,
Made with no loss of time,
A prose kinema, not, not assuredly, alabaster
Or the "sculpture" of rhyme.

While some of Pound’s references may be obscure today, the attack on greed and the commercialization of art seem worthy of this very moment.

A second inspiration for my poem is also a sonnet critical of a current moment. It’s Shelley’s “Sonnet: England In 1819,” which I’ve blogged about before. More explicitly political than Pound’s screed, it’s similarly enraged at the current state of things. “An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king, -/Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow/Through public scorn,” it begins, and then boils over from there.

Here is my poem:

To the Age

by David M. Katz

There are so many things you do not like
But cannot change yourself. You are a mule
That will not leave its stall. Your bones ache.
You’re when and what you are. You are no fool,
But neither are you smart. You make demands,
You dictate how we talk about ourselves,
Supply material for our labels, brands,
And dirty jokes, the canned goods on our shelves.
We’ve taken you for jazz and innocence,
Things that change, although you stay the same
For all the time you’re here. You make no sense
Except to stand for our collective shame.
We each pass through you like the stagnant air,
A darkened cloud, this toxic atmosphere.