About the Poems - JM
About the Poems
by Jonathan Mayhew "One More Plagiarism of F'OH" was written originally in Spanish and, naturally, borrows freely from a few Frank O'Hara poems. "Poem by the Trunk of My Car" takes its cue from Kenneth Koch's "Poems by Ships at Sea." "After Basho" is a free adaptation of a haiku by Basho: "the beginning of cultivated art — a rice-planting song in the back country." "Rhymeless Villanelle" is exactly that: a poem in the Villanelle form that doesn't rhyme. I find the supression of rhyme produces an almost pantoum-like quality in this form. "Pétit poème en prose" takes its title from Baudelaire and Frank O'Hara. I imagined that glass medicine vials such as those found in a Joseph Cornell box might contain certain substances like righteous indignation.