The Coffin

16 THE MINNESOTA REVIEW DONALD BAKER THE COFFIN "all a poet can do today is warn" Wilfred Owen There's no use writing this poem. It will be bad. It will stay unpublished and unknown, except that, as usual, I shall read it to my wife and a few friends. I think of them on their feet, clapping and whistling, swearing never to join the Marines again. For this is a poem by me against war, and that is how wives and friends ought to react, accepting the artifact for the achievement, ego for truth. Actually, little remains to be said against war. It's foolish, trying to add argument, anecdote, or emotion to what better poets than I have already written. And those of you not Nazis at heart have no need to be told. But by way of parenthesis in this dissertation on bad poetry, let me give it the ring of the lecture hall, let me make a statement of theme: Nothing is worse than a war. Pause, for wife and friends to applaud. . . . Thank you. Yes, that's what this poem insists, that nothing is worse than a war, though I have been repeatedly and excitedly warned by professors and other experts, that polemic stultifies art: metrical brilliance, architectonical genius— 17 BAKER irrelevant, once your poem engages itself. Too bad. These are ripe times for poems that speak against war. I should have enjoyed annoying them all by composing a good one. You've probably noted the virtuosity posturing vainly in back of this discourse. Lines 10, 11, and 12, for instance, quintuple vowel alliteration, triple internal rhyme, and the whole poem, with small neglect of intelligence, a tour deforce, practically purged of metaphor — except in that word "purged" and one or two others, "ripe," line 35 above. Ah, me! The craft so long to lerne, wasting itself on a poem so engagé. Dear wife, dear friends, dear reader: this poem, already too long, raises, like war, a tough technical problem: how, successful or not, to stop it. A last Une should click into place, someone has said, like the lid of a coffin. But there's no point in wasting technique on a poem dead from the start. So I'll let you end it, dear people. Abandon your minds, for once, to imagination. Imagine I've stopped. Imagine I'm stepping aside to let the professors rise and rebut. Many things, they will tell you, including this poem, are worse than a war. And who knows?' We're all rational, liberal here. They may be right. But now, before hearing them, why don't you test your technical skill? Ready? Begin. Imagine the coffin. Imagine the lid. Imagine the click. ...