A poem from Festival poet Joel Lipman

ISADORA’S


Ernie Kovacs, radar, austere criticism, no one in my lifetime
disappears into wilderness behind oxen. What madness and loss
in the nerve gas, mow-em-down-n-cover-em-up world, tabletop
poetry shrunk to hideous memorization – that’s nothing.
My heart’s ice melts before Bugs Bunny and an afternoon of animation,
dancers midst the obituary columns.

I turn the computer off in the rain –
no true artist falls in love with a machine.
Houses fill with doowah music and fluorescent canisters.
I’m in love with youthful Picasso and mystic wings,
in love with Lenin, anarchism, everything
against bland catechisms, misery and profit.

So I throw my hands up and down, up and down, crazy flapping
in a way unknown before the d.j. Ooooooh,
my hot arms wrapped around your neck, hips charging
like Spike Jones doing Swan Lake I change the world
from bumbling curiosity to a humming, jerky, Fred Astaire boater,
the Houdini of feet. Name something better than instinct.

I put hot slithery jazz on, slide into the next room
to find someone better dressed than discipline and fear.
Critics spasm as I dance before the mirror naked
singing “I am too voodoo for you – voo, vooo, voooo, too voodoo for you.”

Thank god there is no poetry of religion. Ugh,
imagine a long unadventurous life, never desperate
blues eating your heart out. Long live risk
and joy, aggression, sexual prancing, fabulous feathered robes.

I’ll spin the seven dances of revolt against repression
and symbols of cold. The dancing cop
is a stupid, impossible dream. When, phfffft…
we enter realm without dogma – vast
intuition, unconscious, grand revelatory rhythm of
boom charms, rituals, spells, the acrobatic
be-bop elaborated protest against miserabilism.

Here is Mona Lisa’s electrical system hung from a star,
here storm, here Harpo Marx, here Karl, here the rising phoenix.
Some people hit the streets for a lifetime.
This is my dance.