‘What the Chairman Told Tom’

 Maybe it’s because we live in an age where we can talk about cutting off $400 million to a single university. Or that state universities are cutting programs in the liberal arts. Or that a lot of people think that punishing universities is a good idea.

Maybe it’s just these poisonous times, but I take heart at Basil Bunting’s poem “What the Chairman Told Tom.” You could read this poem almost as if you were telling a joke: A poet walks into a business looking for a job. The chairman says:

 

I want to wash when I meet a poet.

 

They're Reds, addicts, 

all delinquents.

What you write is rot.

 

The chairman rants on. That the poet makes a poem of the rant strikes me as funny. 

Poets can be good or bad, whimsical or serious, grief-stricken or funny. If you’re a person who pursues the arts and the questions we group under the term “humanities,” all kinds of things are possible.

If you’re narrow minded, the possibilities are, by definition, limited. 

• Source and notes: Basil Bunting, The Complete Poems; Bloodaxe Books, 2000. The poem is here:

https://poets.org/poem/what-chairman-told-tom

I think of Bunting, but not as often as I should. For more, see “Bunting: ‘Chomei at Toyama,’ April 19, 2023, and “A bit more on Basil,” April 20, 2023.