Listen to Podcast Interview with Grace Cavalieri on The Poet and the Poem

Rondeau Beginning
With A Quote From Lyndon Baines Johnson

You ain’t learning nothin’ when you’re talking.
A tile’s useless when it lacks good caulking.
Although the craftsman owns the proper tool,
that doesn’t save his art from ridicule:
a telescope don’t make you Stephen Hawking.

Time doesn’t slow when you neglect your clocking;
Diane von Fürstenberg has finished frocking.
You’re waiting in some slack-jawed vestibule
and you ain’t learning nothin’.

A ship is still a vessel in dry-docking.
Velour is valued by its depth of flocking.
When reciprocity’s the golden rule,
as Schopenhauer warns us, “fate is cruel.”
On the Great Blackboard, we are merely chalking,
and you ain’t learning nothin’.


from The Scientific Method