After Michael Palmer II

The future will have sharper edges
It will kick the present's butt

It'll have
"one night cheap hotels / and sawdust restaurants with oyster shells"

André Breton will be studying The Commandments of R&B Drumming
Anything's possible, right?

Jimmy Carter and Jesse Jackson
will get in on the action.

***

Michael Palmer: "Soon"

Soon the present will arrive
at the end of its long voyage

from the Future-Past to Now
weary of the endless nights in cheap motels

in distant nebulae
Will the usual host

of politicians and celebrities
show up for the occasion

or will they huddle out of sight
in confusion and fear

***

This Palmer poem is a little weaker than the other one. I don't like the redundancy of "long voyage" or "distant nebulae." I like the concept of the poem, but not the execution, the actual language. I felt it needed "sharper edges" and something a little more specfiic and astringent. Which politicians would be inserting themselves into the event? I thought immediately of Carter and Jackson, and of course André Breton. I decided to make the T.S. Eliot allusion more explicit. I'm not sure it's really there in the Palmer poem.