January 4–11, 2001
cover story|writing contest winners 2000
Gauloises & Cliff Notes +
Filching & Purloining
%
Cannibalizing & Raping –
Royalty
= Original & Creative
This effulgently derivative elegy of couplets
Will use excerpts of the eminent like silhouettes
To embellish the motif of postmodernism.
But true discernment depends on the prism
Of the curious reader’s acumen and slant.
You may trumpet me a plundering fainéant,
But my succès d’estime de scandale is pacific
Toward the anxiety of influence. A hieroglyphic
Of sap-hazard. Wondering if artistry is maligned or divine,
I’d smuggle. No. Plagiarize this elegy. Still I’m rather too supine.
—frankjmiles
frankjmiles, 22, recently moved to Philadelphia from Plainfield, NJ. With a degree in English, he graduated in June from Rutgers College, where he studied with Jeanne Marie Beaumont and Maurice Charney. This is his first poem to be published non-online or non-collegiate. He currently is working on being conciliatory and contrite with his jocund self-parody’s mutation into fecund self-travesty.