THREE POEMS
City Pastoral
The Dung Beetle
This is a Billy Joe Harris Poem
City pastoral
Garbage trucks
Groaning
Garbage cans
Banging
Car alarms
Sounding off
Noisy pushy
Birds
Waking me at
Dawn
With their
Smartass songs
The Dung Beetle
The Dung Beetle
Makes
Beautiful, perfect
Symmetrical
Balls
Out of shit
this is a billy joE harris poem
This is a Billy Joe Harris
Poem
It’s the only
Type of poem
I can write
I can’t write
A personal Frank O’Hara
Poem
Even tho
I like them
Or
A very personal
Perhaps too
Personal
Charles Bukowski
Poem
Even tho
I like them too
Dear Reader
For the moment
At least
While you are here
You are stuck
Within a
Billy
Joe
Harris
Poem
What is
It like?
You ask
Well, its
A whole
Lot
Like
Me
How do you judge it?
You ask
Well, I don’t
Really know
But I hope
You
Like
Being
Here
With me
is Associate Professor of English at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, where he teaches American literature, African American literature, creative writing and jazz studies. Author of numerous scholarly articles and of poetry in many magazines and anthologies, he has published a critical study, The Poetry and Poetics of Amiri Baraka: The Jazz Aesthetic and two books of poetry, Hey Fella Would You Mind Holding This Piano a Moment and In My Own Dark Way. As well as being the editor of The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, he is co-editor of Call & Response: The Riverside Anthology of the African Literary Tradition and a special issue on Amiri Baraka of The African American Review (Summer/Fall 2003). His most recent work has appeared in The African American Review, uptown conversation: the new jazz study and Every Goodbye Ain’t Gone: An Anthology of Innovative Poetry by African Americans. He is currently writing a book of poems entitled A Guy in a Black SUV and Other Poems and editing a special issue of American Studies on the black visual artist Aaron Douglas.