Sleazy Poets Poem by gershon hepner

Finding poets who are sleazy
unfortunately is most easy.
Dylan Thomas stole from friends,
and never used to make amends
after shitting on their floors
if they let him through their doors.
As philanderer and drunk
he would flourish and not flunk,
but don’t hold against him all
these charges, but recall
Edgar Allen Poe who wed
a 13-year old girl, and Ted,
who had two wives who killed themselves.
His books remain upon our shelves,
like those of T.S. Eliot who
could not abide the low case jew
like Rachel, née Rabinovitch
because they all seemed far too rich,
as he’d been taught by Ezra Pound,
whose views were even more unsound.
Philip Larkin hated im-
migrants, and used to cheat on wo-
men whom he often used to scorn,
preferring to their favors porn.
D.H. Lawrence was a perv,
and most poets don’t deserve
a medal for morality,
which I treat with neutrality,
although I, unlike Ruth Padel,
do not expose, au naturel,
my rhyming rivals, making claims
about their torts and shabby shames,
embarrassing the Oxford Chair
where she, harassing, won’t sit bare,
forced to resign, thank God, for scumming
in ways dons found most unbecoming.
Like other poets I am sleazy,
hardly holy, too Swiss-cheesy,
but hope I don’t exploit like Ruth
men’s foibles for sex-driven truth:
embarrassments I tend to balk at
include harassing Dereck Walcott.

Inspired by the resignation on May 25 2009 of Ruth Padel from Oxford University’s Chair of Poetry because she had played a part in a covert effort to taint her main rival, Dereck Walcott for the post with old allegations of sexual impropriety. On May 18, Michael Deacon had written in the Daily Telegraph about allegations about Walcott that she had help to circulate:
Imagine if Dylan Thomas, for example, were around to apply for the Oxford post today. Thomas drank like a drain, begged and stole from friends, fought with his wife in public, had affairs, and on at least one delightful occasion is said to have defecated on a host’s floor. TS Eliot: another unsuitable candidate. Plough through his collected works and you’ll find, eventually, lines that could be construed as racist, and others as anti-semitic. Then again, Eliot was as nothing next to Philip Larkin, who in private letters to friends and his mother wrote all manner of racist and sexist things. In one letter, he complained about the noise made by black spectators at a cricket match he’d attended at Lord’s, and expressed his regret that there hadn’t been any heavily armed South African police present. (For more, much more, see Anthony Thwaite’s excellent Selected Letters of Philip Larkin.) A few years ago, Channel 4 broadcast a tape Larkin had recorded of himself drunkenly singing, at home, a ditty he’d written urging the expulsion of immigrants, and prison sentences for workers who went on strike. Loved pornography, too. Oh, and he cheated on his girlfriends. Byron: womaniser. Coleridge: drug fiend. Pound: fascist sympathiser. Yeats: snob. Crane: alcoholic. Keats: smackhead. Kipling: imperialist. Hughes: another womaniser. Poe: married a 13 year-old. Verlaine: jailed for shooting one of his friends. Lawrence: pervert. Betjeman: had a bit of a temper on him, apparently. And don’t let’s get started on John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. The booze, the sexually transmitted diseases, the mistresses, the page boys...

5/26/09