Who Can Be A Poet All of the Time? (2026 revision)

by Brett Rutherford

Who can be a poet all the time?

The sons of rich fathers,

remittance men —

spinster heiresses with hyacinth hair,

filling long sheets with

delicate verse —

the wrinkled don retired at last

to his monument of sonnets —

the very young — the truly mad —

the Muse-possessed

(not just visited, inhabited

by the poem-urge) —

But for the rest of us,

being a poet

is at best an illusion,

at worst a vice.

A thing of glory, certainly.

Honor or profit?

not in this age!

Against those professionals,

we migrant poets must distill

into a hundred poems,

the brandy of their thousands,

lift up our frail mimosa leaves

beneath their sky-

consuming oaks.

Vast tomes they fill,

prose interrupted

by spasms of the ENTER key,

or blocks of text

that seem the stuff of Bedlam.

They are at it, day and night.

The mail truck groans

with their outgoing manuscripts.

They teach this stuff.

Honest to God, they are paid to do it!

They sniff at one

another’s résumés.

Their blurbs adorn

one other’s jackets.

They are weighted down with medals.

If you sleep with one,

you can be a contest-winner!

Young rivals beware:

they trample their peers,

for something called “tenure.”

The rest of us

must steal these hours,

scrawl debtors’ ink

on dime-store paper,

consort with the Muse

as though adulterous,

secret as those frenzies

in the alleys of Sodom

between the angels

and the damned.

In the anvil world we live in

we are impractical, slothful,

lounging for adjectives

when we should be “working,”

shouting our newfound lines

against the surf,

to the dead in graveyards,

to the indifferent grackles

on our window ledge —

absolutely useless, this

rootless, anti-

Puritan-ethic obsession —

Except that for these moments,

freely given,

we would nothing trade,

knowing that those who follow us

would forfeit fortunes, too,

for such a poetic seizure,

would trade a life of ease

for a mouthful of words,

the words that come as though

a thunder-god had uttered them.

—Revised 2026

Dead Poets

by Brett Rutherford

Thirteen thousand lady poets,

Poe said,

gave all their verse away —

no wonder he starved!

Too many poets,

that’s the problem!

too many living

poets,

not enough glory fodder

to feed us!

What’s a poet to do?

Become a Dead Poet!

It’s a guaranteed path

to glory, fame and im-

mortality!

There’s the Memorial Reading.

Your friends will come.

Writers who barely knew you

pen verse in your honor.

Then, finally, you appear

in the best anthologies —

something about closed brackets

around your years

seems to appeal to editors.

Critics discover you

(they never feed on anything living)

repeat your words

and have their way with your meaning —

no one cries rape

when words are ravished.

It matters little that your neighbors

have forgotten you —

already the next tenant

shops for oven cleaner,

new tools in the garage.

Oblivious traffic hums on the bridge

you leapt from.

It does not count

that everyone you slept with

is bedding down

with the worst surviving haiku-ists,

that even your best beloved

has put your books in the cellar —

what’s temporal fame

when someone can write

a doctoral thesis

on your use of caesura,

your bittersweet alliteration?

So do it quick —

perish and publish!

When the last petal

on the only wreath

that graced your grave

is borne away

on a winter wind,

your time will come!

— Revised 2026

The Old Gravestones

Pioneer cemetery in Edinboro, PA

 

by Brett Rutherford

Names last, dates fade, deeds disappear.

Try if you will to read these stones —

earth clots around inscriptions,

moss rubs like moist eraser.

Even in best light you cannot read

their rhymes of what heavens they earned

or paid that others should think so.

Stonemason’s script rubs down to worm-lines,

elegant esses and effs are mere wrinkles.

Would anyone know if the stones were swapped,

if pious spinster’s stone became confused

with an outcast wench’s marker,

if brides and grooms and stillborn babes

exchanged their names and families,

half-breed with minister,

hermit with midwife?

What a terrible stew at Resurrection

if these stones were needed,

carried like credit cards

to the last communion!

Even the wind, and wind-borne waters,

shorn of the lake and incontinent clouds

work bald forgetfulness in granite,

sandstone erased, slate shorn by frost and thaw.

Easy to read BORN.

Born is everywhere.

Born as we all are,

but when is gradually erased.

Zeros and eights and nines

curve into shallow depressions,

sevens and ones to cuneiform,

thin lines and gashes.

Easy to read DIED

but isn’t that obvious?

Death dates and Aetat ages

wink out in wind-rub.

A few are blank,

carved and waiting

for sleepers who never came.

(Fought in a war —

no body was found —

went to the city —

ran for a freight train —

or just plain never died?)

Names. The names linger.

Eye leaps from letter to letter,

fills in the biblical

and well-known names.

The sculpted angels are armless now,

the stones once faced

with weeping-willow carvings

are horizontal.

Some have been propped back up

on broken pediments

with bolts and metal braces.

Do they toss in their sleep?

Do stones fly up

like lumpy pillows,

tilt down

to shade unhappy eyes?

I too would turn

if line by line

and page by page

the universe erased me!

—Revised 2026

A Review of Christopher Nolan's Odyssey

by Brett Rutherford

Christopher Nolan’s film is a triumph, a milestone in the history of ancient-world epics.

A translator of The Odyssey (Emily Wilson), whose work Nolan admired and claimed as an inspiration, has condemned the script and the acting in rather insulting terms, even as interest in the film is driving the sales of her translation up into Harry Potter land.

The slug-like creature known as Elon Mollusk has offered to make his own AI-generated version of The Odyssey, suggesting that Mel Gibson might direct it. All to correct the supposed DEI and “woke” components of the script and casting.

I am myself a captive creature of the classics, having adapted a number of classic Greek poets, and having authored a long poem that is a prequel to The Iliad. I have read various English translations of both epics, and I prefer Lattimore for The Iliad and Fitzgerald for The Odyssey. A peek at Wilson’s translation did not stir me. Therefore I offer the following disconnected comments about The Odyssey from a vantage of great familiarity with the literature and its tradition.

Surprise! I was thrilled and delighted with Nolan’s film.

It is not a linear or literal adaptation of Homer’s poem. Even compressed, that would take maybe 24 hours, or a mini-series running three seasons. What this film offers instead is the heart of The Odyssey’s plot and many of its characters, as re-purposed and re-imagined by a film-maker with a brain of his own, and many points to make about our present-day world, and our own nation’s obsession with war.

The swash-buckling hero of the sword-and-sandal films, this Odysseus is not. He is a war veteran with PTSD, memory loss, drug addiction, and a dread of going home where a line of widows and orphans would meet him on the dock and demand to know what happened to their sons and brothers. For that, he has no answer. He has lost every single man, some in battle at Troy, and the rest in calamities on the war home.

In several flashbacks to the fall of Troy, Odysseus is seen as becoming a passive observer of the carnage his clever invention of the Trojan Horse has brought upon the fallen city. He sees women and children cut down in the streets. The King of Kings of the Greeks, Agamemnon, passes through the gates of Troy in the guise of Darth Vader.

There are no gods in this film. The “Athena” who keeps appearing to counsel him is not the goddess, but one of his shell-shock hallucinations. She is, in fact, an apparition of a priestess of Athena he saw beheaded at Troy. You might have to see the film twice to realize this.

There are monsters in this film, oh yes. A terrific Cyclops who devours humans head first in a direct imitation of the Goya painting Saturn Devouring His Children. The witch Circe is a man-hater, turning house-guests into pigs until she is persuaded by Odysseus to change her ways (the year of sex between witch and warrior are omitted). The whirlpool and hydra-like monster, and the giants, are the stuff of nightmares, and Nolan, not employing AI in any way, uses full size models and various tricks of photography to pull of the remarkable episodes.

Now here I want to digress about these monster stories. The Odyssey begins in “Homer’s” voice, as an omniscient narrator, but all the stories of the mishaps involving enchantresses and monsters, are related by Odysseus himself while he is a guest at dinner. They are table talk bardic episodes. The places and creatures did not exist, and no Greek had ever seen a Cyclops. Odysseus is a cunning man, a trickster, and perhaps a desperate liar because he cannot in any other way account for the loss of his men. None of them, not one, returned from Troy.

The reason I dwell on this is that Nolan gives us Odysseus’s most outlandish tall tale, that of his and his crew’s journey to Hades, through a mysterious “back door” far to the North (Iceland, it seems.) This scene reduced me to rubble. It is unsettling and terrifying, especially to a poet.

Nolan has Odysseus and his men make a hasty retreat from Hades, pursued by the shades of the unburied dead of Ithica. In Homer’s original tall-tale, Odysseus meets more and more famous Greeks going back to the earliest times. He never explains how he recognizes all these ghosts as they approach him to talk, and he stops himself and apologizes to his host. He has overstepped the human and is on over his depth.

What I believe Nolan has perceived, correctly, is that Odysseus has lied his way home, a broken man, and that, once in Ithaca he would have only his tall tales to justify his long absence. Nolan has the hero relate each of these “tales” to Calypso as recovered memories. Which cannot be trusted.

Odysseus’s flashback to Troy is his Oppenheimer moment. Nolan has worked the whole story to bring us here. It is not about ancient Greeks. It is about us. It is about every broken-down veteran in a doorway. It is about the soldier asked to go through the gates of a strange city and kill on sight. It is about the invention of monsters where none exist.

This is a masterpiece of cinema. A masterpiece of story-telling. An experience that will linger for years in the minds of viewers.

I am sorry that classicists are offended. I am sorry that Greeks are offended, claiming that a universal classic belonging to all humankind can be "culturally appropriated" – rubbish!

I am sorry that the film did not have a more high-toned script with more literary language. I did not like Telemachus call his father his “Dad.” That was the director’s choice.

I am sorry that most audiences will not have the context to understand why the Trojan War started, what preceded the fall of Troy, and, hence its effect on those who sacked it. The Odyssey is a sequel, the greatest sequel ever. The violation of hospitality when a prince of Troy stole Helen, the wife of Menelaus, triggered the ten-year siege.

Hades, soon enough, will be full of critics quarreling over Nolan’s Odyssey. The food down there consists mostly of sour cherries, which should suit them.

Twenty-Year New Yorker, After His Exile

by Brett Rutherford

Though I thought I had shed it,
this city has grown on me,
my head-top
soaring amid the
clouds, fingers
outstretched
toward the harbor goddess.

I am all of it —
luster and greed,
poet and dreamer —
landlords unnamed in tinsel-gold
lording it over the Lorca slums —
infant stock brokers
in twin baby prams,
their nanny pushing past
doorways where tattooed
squatter punks rage — the towers
and their polished atriums
clean and classic for an Age of Silver —

cameras watch everything, as bulky men
in blue uniforms eye multiples screens
for back-packed likely suspects, yet eyes
avert from the darkened outer avenues
whose concrete canyons smoke
with suppressed resentment.

I can be all and celebrate all,
make my inkwell of the
things you dare not think of:
the crumbling infraworld
of steam pipes that, bursting,
cook office workers like
lobsters, the rivets and spikes
that loosen beneath the wheels
of the subway, the furtive shadow
that gives itself in doorways
to random takers.

This is Atlantis, Babel, Gomorrah and Tyre,
The Temple of Dendur, Tyrannosaur,
Ming, Ch’ing and Tang ceramic
Carnegie Hall, the Opera, the Symphony,
the thunder-thump of 1812 in the Park.
The nights of undulating ecstasy
sparking still in a hundred thousand eyes
in the city that will not sleep
and will not surrender its secret yearnings,
the pagan embrace of gods in underwear
towering over neon flesh amphitheatre,
Times Square unsquaring America
into Dionysian dervish naked dancing.

I am the weed-lot strewn with mattress springs,
the chaste fountains of Lincoln Center,
the pride of the library lions on Fifth Avenue.
Long-legged Athena strides here in the sunlight —
behind her, a meth Medusa beckoning.
Forward or backward? Where will this city go?
Where its inhabitants?
Jack hammers and dynamite
remake my countenance,
revise my profile.
I am always fleeing this city to save my soul.
I am always coming back
to make it anew in marble.

          —

Revised 2026

Arabesques on The Statue of Liberty (2026 Version)

 by Brett Rutherford

1

Bad Dingo rides

the Staten Island ferry dusk till dawn,

clinging to rail,

nestling an all-night tumescence,

hard at the sight of the robed lady,

vast, unapproachable.

He’s stalking her.

He bides his time.

Some night

there’d be a fog,

a power failure.

He’d come up behind her,

he’d prod the small

of her spine

with his imperious knife,

jostle her bronze buttocks

with his ardent flesh-prod.

She’d drop the tablet;

the torch would sputter.

He’d push her off her pedestal.

Bad Dingo would give it to her good

the way he did to other white ladies

in parks and stairwells and subway cars.

This would be the rape of all rapes,

the pinnacle of his career,

the ultimate boast:

“See that goddess

flat on her back in the harbor —

she ain’t so proud now

since someone had her,

made her moan.

Bad Dingo had her,

stuck it to the Statue,

white lady Liberty!”

2

In Chinatown,

Mrs. Wang mounts

a quiet

rebellion

against the ways of the elders.

She has done all

her mother asked her:

married the boy

the matchmaker ordained,

bore sons and daughters

in regular order,

burned joss and incense

at every altar

sent ghost gold and peaches,

phantom cars and televisions,

Hong Kong Hell dollars

to the teeming, greedy dead.

Now her husband travels,

has mistresses, won’t talk

about his gambling.

Her children are gone,

married to foreign devils.

Her round-eyed grandchildren

will not learn Mandarin,

nor will they send joss wealth

to her once she is dead.

A dream-voice told her, "Live,

and make each day

count as a year."

So she becomes a whirlwind,

sells off her jade and porcelain,

cleans out the savings account,

her husband knew nothing about

buys an airline ticket for San Francisco —

and after that, who knows?

She pawns the statuette

of pearly white Kuan-Yin,

the Goddess of Mercy

whose only blessing

was endless childbirth

and wash this, iron-that.

On a whim she buys another

to take its place at her bedside:

a foot-high Statue of Liberty

with batteries and glowing torch.

She leaves it for her husband,

her wedding ring

on its spiky crown.

3

Today two New York titans

switch places.

A grumpy Green Liberty

strides up Fifth Avenue.

She crushes pedestrians

in verdigris splatter.

Her sandaled feet

send buses flying,

kiosks shattering.

Her great head turns

among the office towers. She reaches in,

pulls screaming executives

through razor-edge panes,

undresses them

with her copper fingers,

discards them one by one

to the pavement

twenty stories below.

The man she wants

is not among them. He’s got

to be a real American,

one of those Arrow shirt models,

blond, and a screamer,

a yielding but unwilling male

under her stern metallic nails.

The more he'd cry outPut me down!

the more she would like him.

Uptown, she finds one —

a tousle-headed messenger,

Viking-blond and thin as a rail —

she scoops him up —

his empty bike totters

and is instantly stolen.

Imperious male that he is,

he bellows Put me down!

She cups him in one palm,

drops her tablet,

rolls up her sleeves,

and starts the painful ascent

of the Empire State Building.

Up there, they would be alone together.

She'd show him the top of the world.

Downtown

on Liberty Island,

a great ape replaces

the green goddess.

King Kong wields a torch,

incinerates all passing freighters,

inspects all passenger ships

to toss away all

who do not meet his standards.

He hurls great boulders skyward,

warns off incoming airplanes

with a shake of his might fists.

Homeland Security Kong,

appointed by the President himself,

he guards the harbor now.

He is a real American

and he shouts his slogans:

America First! Stay out!

Go home!

No foreigners allowed!

    — c. 1987, revised 2026

Ariadne

Titian - Ariadne and Dionysus (Bacchus)

by Brett Rutherford

I’ve walked this edge
of solitude full circle now
a hundred times —
how long before I realized
I was alone, on an island,
a state for which no word exists
but “uninhabited.”

With no one above or below me,
this thing upon my head,
a corona fringed with many jewels
means nothing. If I call,
“Bring nourishment!”
I am my own servant and cook.
Of what am I princess?
Beach, beach, and cliff,
and rocky beach again
and nothing on the horizon.

Sometimes peninsulas appear,
suggesting a path to land,
but sunrise never fails to find
me here, astride the same rock,
the tide withdrawing
or coming in, the beach
a mere arc of a closed circle,
draped with the shorn clothes
of ocean, the false hair
of a reddened jellyfish,
the ribbon green of seaweed. 

Am I not still a missing person?
Does no one search for me?
I launch some fragile bottles —
gourds sealed with wax
or tiny jetsam offerings
I seal with sea-grass and commit
to the receding waves.

Inside them, my tree-bark letters
beg for a hasty rescue.
Others address the gods,
beseeching Poseidon
to dash and drown 

that traitor Theseus —
the man who brought me
to this nowhere,
who lured me with promises
and sea-foam oaths,
who then abandoned me
for his sailors, for the first
prevailing wind to Greece. 

My bottles dash
against the coral reef —
they break too soon,
or fall to the hands
of illiterate fishermen.

From the crown King Minos,
my father, gifted me,
I pick away some diadem gems
and add them to the sea-gift.
Even these bribes
cannot attract a rescuer.
One diamond returned
on the back of a dolphin! 

Here where this jagged mount
of Naxos scrapes sky,
harping a stone calliope
with fingers of wind, I wait,
far off the route of ships.
Someone below the horizon shall hear
the somber moan of this unpeopled place.
Some ship must turn toward me —
before my hag-years are upon me.
I am still young, and worthy of love. 

Is there a spell upon me? Are thousands here
invisible to me, going about
their daily lives, invisible to me?
Am I invisible to them as well?
Why do I find things to eat, and wells
not one of which is dry, at every turn?
Why are there grapes, and olives
if no one tends them? “You'll be fine,”
the lying Theseus assured me. “Naxos
will welcome and honor you.”
Am I a ghost, the walking dead?
Have I already become
A mythological person?

Only a hero can avenge me.
No, only a god can cancel
the vacancy of Theseus
that pulls inside of me
like an inverted birth.
In my dreams I begin to see another,
the purple sails of his galley,
his laughing eyes, the wreath
of grape leaves in his golden hair.
What better bride for an unknown god
than a nearly-forgotten princess? 

Even before he knows my name, at sight of me
he proclaims his undying affection.
No worldly treasures attract him:
as proof of love he hurls my Cretan crown
into the starry vault of heaven.
Strange pipes and cymbals sound, Satyrs
and Maenads attend our wedding.
Whole forests are torn asunder,
and no Greek from this time forward
shall have a sound night's sleep. 

Ungrateful heroes! New gods come out of nowhere,
and the age of Dionysus is upon us!