In Memory of Anthony Bourdain
I'm not a poet.
I do try to write poems, but whether they fully become poems or not is beyond my control.
A friend once said that if you write at least one good poem, then you are a poet.
Who would judge what is a good poem?
But I'm not a poet in another sense as well.
The primal poets were those who first used language in rhyme, making lines easier to memorize. It was the times of oral tradition. These days, oral tradition is almost exclusively reserved for online porn.
In my view, they ceased to be the poets with the emergence of the writer as a cultural star in the twentieth century.
Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, to name a few, or rather, to name only three.
They were sexy, they were it, they were poets.
And they were replaced by songwriters in the 1960s.
Who, in turn, were superseded by rappers in the 1990s.
And rappers, in the 2000s, were unseated by celebrity chefs.
Thus, chefs are the real poets of today.
And poets laureate are those chefs who cook with laurel.
