"To Apostrophe"


Apostrophe! you are my favorite rhetorical figure.
Not really. Actually you are kind of embarrassing
in twentieth and twentyfirst-century poetry.
It is awkward to address inanimate objects and
abstract concepts that cannot answer back
as I am now addressing you, though I wish
you would answer me and prove me wrong!

You served Keats and Shelley well and
enjoyed a brief vogue in the 80s among English professors
who thought you the essence of poetic speech
in your artificial and dumb splendor.
Chiasmus got jealous and sulked.

Now you are only good in ironic or comic roles:
I loved you though in Kenneth Koch's "New Addresses"
which rekindled your career and proved
your critics wrong, including me.
Who knows who'll use you next? So long.