Christopher Franke

Christopher Franke was born (1941) and raised in Lakewood, Ohio. He has been the editor of Everyman and founded Deciduous Press (1970). Besides his many broadsides and pamphlets, he has published these books of poetry: Title (CSU Poetry Center 1975) and Select Routines (Ptrint Press 2007). He is an avid supporter of poetry, a member of most Cleveland poetry groups, and a frequent reader at all Cleveland poetry venues and has read with orchestrated accompaniment. At one point, he worked off his jail time (for not painting his house) by doing ‘social service’ reading poetry to fellow inmates, homeless, nursing homes patients, and others.

Video
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=1531926341433699029

A Reading Poet
by Christopher Franke

A real bad bard—
Concurrent with
a movie of:
pimps, whores, and dope—
I’ve been a fool in school,
& poet to pupils,
for money
and a plastic lunch,
& under a ‘prohibition’
as though Pope said,
‘Drink deep but not the dregs.’
And I have read
at a college or two,
for no credit.
--Not that I’m read.

Not that I’m read!—
I’ve read my work
to the accolades
of jukeboxes
in bars; and behind bars,
in work houses,
like speech
were a breach
of security:
I’ve been
non in-
mate non grata.
I’ve read to the crazy
and had them laugh
where they shouldn’t ‘of.’
I’ve read to the sic
and make them snicker.
Putting them out
of their misery,
to the bored,
I’ve read reams.
I’ve read to the ignorant
and been ignored.

I’ve read my poems
in a parking lot…
to attending cars;
and gone
to a junkyard or two.
My racecar poem,
I’ve read to soup lines.
Trailing off in a plethora
of lovelorn poems,
I have been at
the water’s edge,
the bridge’s moving
over head;
I have driven
the aged
off their rockers;
and put in a tizzy
a poet or two.

I’ve read
in libraries
to clutches of poets,
and in community centers, too;
in vain in churches,
in bookstores, and in justice centers,
to music, and dissent! At workshops,
I have found poems
quivering before Occam,
or in vises caught.
Like notches on a handle
they spoke of the drafts
through which poems
had passed.
Against their—versions,
I progress.
To ‘curb the doggerel,’
I’ve hit the road…
and read on the street.
I have read to concrete and glass;
I’ve read to blossoms & to grass.

And then in coffee houses,
I’ve read to chess and talk,
above the mechanizations
of Cappuccino and Espresso.
I’ve read to writers writing while I read
who wrote on the backs of my broadsides.
And, also, I’ve read my poems
to bursting rooms,
to demimonde
and demitasse,
and to the volumes
on their shelves…
at home.

A Clean Poem
by Christopher Franke

I put this poem in the bathtub
in all her verbal dress,
and while I was reaching for the soap,
her dress shrank,
and she popped right out of her metaphor.
She hit the ceiling like a champagne cork
and then splashed back with lost effervescence.
I grabbed her by a gerund
and scrubbed her where she itched,
behind her verbs and nouns,
washing away a few adverbs and adjectives.—
I blush to think of what the verbs did,
and who the nouns were,
before their Reformation.—
Then when I was sure the job was done,
I pulled the plug from the tub
and saw an erotic image go down the drain
as a ring of expletives remained
in a ring of do it
but don’t talk of it,
and don’t do it either.
And there stood the poem,
dripping wet, clean, and naked.