holds his lighter up to a five pound note.
If you can’t handle this, the lecturer declares,
then you won’t be able to handle poetry,
with its inherent antipathy toward all capital.
He proceeds to burn the money. Is this
a form of performance art? Might this very act
constitute a poem in itself? How would he like it,
I’m sat there thinking, if a stockbroker or something
were to walk up to him and burn a poem
right in front of his face? In any case,
couldn’t he have made his point in words
and given the fiver to charity? Words, after all,
are his stock in trade. Perhaps he was saying
through his actions that sometimes words
are simply not enough. Or perhaps he hoped
that one or more of his students would go back
to their crappy little room and write a poem
about the whole experience. Could it be
that he was hoping to start a movement,
and that his acolytes, bearing torches, would go
and burn the banks? Maybe he was thinking sod it,
they don’t pay me enough anyway, I’ve nothing much
to lose. Or its converse: they pay me too much
when all I ever wanted to be was a poor, starving artiste...
The lecturer, it seems, has a point to make
and the money to burn to make it.
And if, perchance, there isn’t a point,
well it’s worth a fiver to fake it.
Joshua Seigal
