Yuan Changming
[monody to presidential candidates]
They are great speech actors, working with
Eight classes of words and
Seven syntactic elements
Changing singulars to plurals
Passive into active, or otherwise
A whole set of rules
All as conventional
As idioms per se
Adding some new vocab every year
Their job is to make new sentences
Based on the same old grammar
Yuan Changming is the author of the poetry collection Chansons of a Chinaman (Leaf Garden Press, 2009), and the critical monograph Politics and Poetics: A Comparative Study of John Keats and Li He (LAP Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010). His poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Literary Review of Canada, London Magazine, Paris/Atlantic, Poetry Salzburg Review, SAND, Taj Mahal Review, The Threepenny Review, Two Thirds North, and many other journals, as well as in The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2009 (Tightrope Books, 2009), edited by A. F. Moritz and Molly Peacock, and The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2012 (Tightrope Books, 2012), edited by Carmine Starnino and Molly Peacock. Born and raised in Songzi, China, Yuan holds a PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan, and lives in Vancouver, BC, where he edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan.
SUBMIT to What Rough Beast via our SUBMITTABLE site.
If you enjoyed today’s poem, and you value the What Rough Beast series, consider making a donation to Indolent Books, a nonprofit poetry press.