LOOKING UP
Wearisome at-poem acknowledgements --
not "After X" but "hub-gear reference
from X's 1997 play
The track" -- displagiarise the work, or may.
But if I read with search to hand online,
I joy at how much learning becomes mine:
the play's plot, and its failure, X's switch
from plays to teaching, X's crowd-fund pitch
in 2015, where the scent goes cold,
the 20s German models who first told
the stories in the play, the engineers
they mocked, the fireless basis of their fears,
the 40s seeming vindication of
the kludge in post-war rebuild some still love,
the 60s doubts. With all these I withdraw
my charge the lengthy credits were a bore.
This was another poem written in response to a prompt in Jo Bell's 52: write a poem a week. The prompt in this case was number 47, for a poem about learning, though the poem is wholly fictitious.
It reached self-publication when I posted it as three tweets among the replies to one by Nina Parmenter on the subject of references in poems.
