Artie Gold

I like this poem - not my usual style but now that he's dead, we can support his work, right? Isn't that how it's supposed to go?

Don't Stop Clapping Till I'm Famous


It was the greatest poetry reading Canada ever had
AJM Smith was there with his Polaroid land camera
Earle Birney stood by the door flipping his lucky
both-sides-beaver nickel
The Governor-General smiled like a Parisian-born trick
you could hear everywhere hoofbeats of moose & windblown birch boughs
Everyone was related to everybody else.
Across the audience smiles broke like quebec bridges
I kept thinking the face on the very next guy to read was the
spitting image of an autumn-blown maple leaf atop Mount Royal
we threw the critics out early in the show
(they asked the poets the wrong kind of questions and we just knew
they'd leave early and cause trouble for us
/ at the banks)
famous people read aloud and no smart-asses coughed at crucial points
the concluding speech told you what the next fifty years of Canadian
poetry would be like, whereupon
All stood
And the flag
was raised & lowered by the unseen hands
of Robert Service's ghost who'd been with us since intermission.
I was proud
alka-seltzer-proud …

a patriot was stationed at each exit and it was the patriot's duty
to after each poet read / fling open the door to the subzero howling
winds which beat at all our faces and cold that turned the sweat on our
cheeks to icicles / while a sign was held up above the stage's dais which
read:
DON'T STOP CLAPPING FOR A MINUTE FOLKS
OR YOU'LL NEVER HOLD ANOTHER PENCIL BETWEEN
YOUR FROSTBITTEN FINGERS
- thank you
- merci