Ulysses in Burlington, Vermont

Here is a poem I wrote a while back. It’s one of my favorite poems. However, nobody else likes it. I have submitted it to several publications and none of them show any interest. In one case, the poem was met with outright hostility. So, either the editors are stunningly poor judges of poetry, or I am.

I am always amazed at how some artists can’t recognize their own mediocrity. Alfred Austen (the poet laureate of England after Tennyson’s death) being a prime example (The Joy of Bad Verse by Nicholas T. Parsons). Here was a man whose breathtaking mediocrity was only rivaled by his sense of genius. Maybe I fall into that category. You be the judge.

Anyway, one of the reasons I like the poem so much is because it was fun to write. I took Tennyson’s Ulysses and tried to “modernize” it. At the same time, I closely followed his grammatical style and used much of his vocabulary. This gives the poem the odd feeling of being in two worlds at once, I know. I came up with the idea a while back when I read that student Edward Elgar (an English late-romantic composer), came up with the idea of re-writing Mozart’s (40th or 41rst?) symphony while using all the same note “values”. In other words, he changed the melody but kept everything else the same. I wanted to know how that would work in poetry.

It’s a pastiche. In the musical sense, this means that we take an old song and put new words in it, giving it a new meaning. For my part, I tried to turn the whole thing upside down.