My publishing career began on this date in 1978. The following poem has been trapped on yellowing newsprint for 48 years. Run free, poem:
Poem to Be Named Later
The interleague trading deadline was
approaching for the American
and National Poetry Leagues. The
Sioux City Shakespeares and the Wichita
Whitmans were working on an eight-poem deal
involving three epic narratives,
two speedy blank verse ballads, two
sexy limericks, and a love poem
in iambic pentameter. The
deadline drew near but still the Sioux City
front office wasn’t satisfied.
After all, they had led both leagues in
allusive alliteration the
year before. They wanted more. The Whitmans
needed some good defensive back-up poems
that could also hit with power. So
at the last moment they threw in an
undisclosed amount of rhyming
dictionaries and a poem to be named
later. You are now reading the poem
to be named later. It stayed two seasons
with the Shakespeares, most of the time sitting
on the bench, before being sent down to
the Biscayne Byrons in the double-A
Couplet League. Last winter it retired
from pro poetry and went to work in
the accounting department of a bank
in Fort Lauderdale. They never did
get around to naming it.
Copyright © 1978 by Steven Bryan Bieler. Appeared in the Fall 1978 “Sex & Sports” issue of Dark Horse magazine, not Dark Horse Comics and not the song by Katy Perry.
