Paul Groves
Chauvinist Verse
The trouble with poetry now
is that too many women are writing it.
From San Francisco to Slough
their streetwise jottings extend.
Perhaps we men are inviting it.
Back when I was a lad
it was Wystan and Louis and others.
Though some of the stuff was bad,
on most of it you could depend.
It wasn’t done by their mothers.
The Robert Conquests have gone
into the shadows, as have
the Charles Madges, the John
Lehmanns, the Henry Treeces.
Under the spotlights weave
other celebrities, skirted,
lipsticked. From Harvard to Hitchin
innumerable assorted
sisters, aunts, and nieces
have flung down their wares in the kitchen
and taken up baring their soul.
The feminist and the toughie
strut their stuff. On the whole
it’s okay, I suppose, but Rex Warner
rather than Carol Ann Duffy
is what I am used to. Girls
used to be so compliant.
The Susans, Shirleys, and Avrils
who knew their place in the corner
nowadays are defiant.
It makes one feel uneasy.
There appears to be little hope
that things will improve. These queasy
feelings may have no end,
thanks to Adcock and Rumens and Cope
and the rest of the uppish bunch.
The virus is out of the lab.
It’s already come to the crunch.
Most chaps on whom one could depend
are somewhere under a slab.
Page(s) 72-73
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