Off the Shelf Archive - November #2

This fine poem by Langston Hughes is going into the archive to make room for the final November selection, a poem  XXX, by a Finnish poet I've recently been introduced to, Penttii Saarikoski. Since no comments are published on that page, feel free to comment on either poem here.

So without further ado, here's Langston Hughes speaking to us from the Great Depression about our lives today:

Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria
 

Fine living . . . a la carte?
Come to the Waldorf-Astoria!

LISTEN HUNGRY ONES!
Look! See what Vanity Fair says about the
new Waldorf-Astoria:

"All the luxuries of a private home. . . ."
Now, won't that be charming when the last flop-house
has turned you down this winter?
Furthermore:
"It is far beyond anything hitherto attempted in the hotel
world. . . ." It cost twenty-eight million dollars. The fa-
mous Oscar Tschirky is in charge of banqueting.
Alexandre Gastaud is chef. It will be a distinguished
background for society.
So when you've no place else to go, homeless and hungry
ones, choose the Waldorf as a background for your rags--
(Or do you still consider the subway after midnight good
enough?)

ROOMERS
Take a room at the new Waldorf, you down-and-outers--
sleepers in charity's flop-houses where God pulls a
long face, and you have to pray to get a bed.
They serve swell board at the Waldorf-Astoria. Look at the menu, 
will you:

GUMBO CREOLE
CRABMEAT IN CASSOLETTE
BOILED BRISKET OF BEEF
SMALL ONIONS IN CREAM
WATERCRESS SALAD
PEACH MELBA

Have luncheon there this afternoon, all you jobless.
Why not?
Dine with some of the men and women who got rich off of
your labor, who clip coupons with clean white fingers
because your hands dug coal, drilled stone, sewed gar-
ments, poured steel to let other people draw dividends
and live easy.
(Or haven't you had enough yet of the soup-lines and the bit-
ter bread of charity?)
Walk through Peacock Alley tonight before dinner, and get
warm, anyway. You've got nothing else to do.


Langston Hughes 1902-1967



Illustration: Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, New York City, circa 1950  public domain

Off the Shelf Archive - November #1

This Off the Shelf poem by 20th Century American poet Charles Bukowski  is being archived here in the main stream to make room for the next November selection, (a Depression era poem that might as well have been written this morning, entitled Advertisement for the Waldorf Astoria, by  Langston Hughes )

So here for a final read is Bukowski's visceral and excellent To The Whore Who Stole My Poems:

To The Whore Who Took My Poems

some say we should keep personal remorse from the
poem,
stay abstract, and there is some reason in this,
but jezus;
twelve poems gone and I don't keep carbons and you have
my
paintings too, my best ones; its stifling:
are you trying to crush me out like the rest of them?
why didn't you take my money? they usually do
from the sleeping drunken pants sick in the corner.
next time take my left arm or a fifty
but not my poems:
I'm not Shakespeare
but sometime simply
there won't be any more, abstract or otherwise;
there'll always be money and whores and drunkards
down to the last bomb,
but as God said,
crossing his legs,
I see where I have made plenty of poets
but not so very much
poetry.

Charles Bukowski








Illustration: Old Man in Sorrow(On the Threshold of Eternity) by Vincent Van Gogh, wikimedia commons Off the Shelf poems are selected for contrast & to highlight some of my favorite semi-obscure poets.