Beer Bottles

Irving Katzenstein told me a poem once
that had been written by a friend of his:

There are more paintings in the world
Than empty beer bottles.

I have forgotten the name of the man who wrote it
and now that Irving is gone I’ll never know,
but I think of it so often, changing it to:

There are more poems in the world
Than empty beer bottles.

So many millions of poems have been written!
What happens to them all? Who reads them?
I remember so many I have loved at one time or another
and then lost somewhere along the way.
I remember a poem by Edgar Fawcett that gave me
some of my most satisfactory sex fantasies
when I was a boy (I found it in the virginal bookcase
of my maiden aunts) and a little later
an exquisite small book in green covers, called
A Cabinet of Jade, by David O’Neil
(he was George O’Neil’s uncle and now they are both forgotten)
then there were the wonderful poems of Walter Conrad Arensberg,
now forgotten, though he himself is not,
being the most illustrious collector of Duchamp
(he also had some very peculiar theories about Dante and Shakespeare)
and there was Mina Loy, whom Ezra Pound
considered as good a poet as Marianne Moore,
now quite forgotten (she might make a come-back, though)
and there were the six-syllable poems of Yvor Winters,
the dada poems of Louis Aragon
and of Elsa, Baroness von Freytag-Loringhoven,
and that great-souled woman, Charlotte Perkins Stetson,
who wrote the poem about the recalcitrant butterfly:

I do not want to fly!
I want to be a worm!

and the New England woman, whoever she was, who wrote:

I don’t know whether I’m High Church
And I don’t know whether I’m Low.

and I remember a lovely poem by Helen Frazee-Bower
who disappointed me when I rediscovered her forty years later
by having become a tub-thumping, come-to-Jesus evangelist,
and a noble poem by George Brandon Saul who afterwards
did something about Yeats, the last I heard of him
he was working in an advertising agency in Hartford.

And there are the long poems:

“between 1650 and 1670
French poets produced as many as
forty epic poems”

and the English are not far behind. Who reads them?
Who reads, for example, Sir Richard Blackmore?
As for me, for The Light of Asia and Towards Democracy
I would gladly sacrifice:

Paradise Lost
Paradise Regained
The Prelude
and The Excursion

and Sir Christopher Hatton wrote The Silver Swan.
There is no greater lyric poem in English.
he must have written lots of other poems.
What happened to them all? Where are they now?

Beer bottles…beer bottles.

From Climbing to Monfumo by Lindley Williams Hubbell. The Ikuta Press, 1977.