Untitled 2 Poem by Denis Mair

(in response to Ralph la Charity's poem about the spoken word poetry scene in my home state Ohio, titled 'not an artifice')
... ... ... ... ... ... ... ... ...
a particular kind of modernist exploratory engagement,

engaged in by those who proved themselves worthy
of having been born vocally equipped...

certainly the population flung across that stretch of land

had been explosively leavened by historical accelerants

and really needed to be made sense of, not by fashionable theories,

but by being expressed in heart-searching speech...

I can imagine there was need for live vocal access

to the heart of that moment's experience,

by people whose ability to elicit each other's heightened speech

proved they belonged together.

I tasted only a bit of that later, out of state,

too late to live it as a full life arc.