Theodorous says I shouldn't write poetry until I've studied the last thousand years

Theodorous says I shouldn't write poetry
until I've studied the last thousand years

of the canon, learnt it     off by heart
and can quote it at random, and imitate it

before attempting my own stuff, and he says
it's imperative I start with hendecasyllables

a la Pliny Jr, but I retaliated, saying
I found the lot of it B-O-R-I-N-G

B. Evaristo, The Emperor's babe (2001), 83-84

I've just bought Hertfordshire, you know

I am a man of multiple interests: a senator,
military man, businessman, I undertake

trading missions for the government ,
and I'm a landowner,

I've just bought Hertfordshire, you know.

B. Evaristo, The Emperor's babe (2001), 15-16

(Winsome doesn’t think Hazel should be in their reading group)

She and the reading group had a big argument, no, it wasn’t no argument, it was a debate, the other day, about whether a poem was good because they related to it, or whether it was good in and of itself

Bernadette said it was up to the literature specialists to decide what was good, they only knew whether they liked something or not

Winsome agreed, she wasn’t no expert

Celestine said poetry was made deliberately difficult so that only a few clever people could understand it as a way to keep everyone else in the dark

Hazel said novels was better value than poetry books because they had more words in them, poetry books was a rip-off
(Winsome doesn’t think Hazel should be in their reading group)

Dora said there was no such thing as objective truth and if you think something’s good because it speaks to you
it is
why should Wordsworth or Whitman, T. S. Eliot or Ted Hughes mean anything special to we people of the Caribbean?

Winsome made a note to go to the library to look those names up

B. Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019), 253-4