"Underground" (by Barack Obama)

Barack Obama wrote this poem as an undergraduate:

Underground

Under water grottos, caverns
Filled with apes
That eat figs.
Stepping on the figs
That the apes
Eat, they crunch.
The apes howl, bare
Their fangs, dance,
Tumble in the
Rushing water,
Musty, wet pelts
Glistening in the blue.

– Barack Obama

(Published in Feast in 1981)

“At eighteen, as an undergraduate, [Obama] was already a much better poet than our former Secretary of Defense William Cohen, who keeps publishing terrible poetry. And then there is Jimmy Carter, who is in my judgment literally the worst poet in the United States.” – Harold Bloom

Comments

[Laura Orem]

The enjambment is interesting - especially "The apes howl, bare/their fangs".

[Roger Thurman]

Has he written since?

[Linda Sue Grimes]

Harold Bloom on Obama as poet: “If I had been shown these poems by one of my undergraduates and asked, Shall I go on with it?, I would have rubbed my forehead and said, On the whole, my dear, probably not. Your future is not as a person of letters.“