Balboa, the Entertainer
Balboa, the Entertainer - meaning Summary
Creation from New Materials
The poem argues that art must be made from new, lived materials rather than borrowed ideas. The speaker—aware of communal claims like "The People"—insists on personal accountability, presenting poems as a bodily "graph" that follows where flesh ends. It mixes urgency about love and mortality with a plea for authenticity: create until your work reaches the limits of the body, even as music and touch trail off into loss.
Read Complete AnalysesIt cannot come except you make it from materials it is not caught from. (The philosophers of need, of which I am lately one, will tell you. ôThe People,? (and not think themselves liable to the same trembling flesh). I say now, ôThe People, as some lesson repeated, now, the lights are off, to myself, as a lover, or at the cold wind. Let my poems be a graph of me. (And they keep to the line where flesh drops off. You will go blank at the middle. A dead man. But die soon, Love. If what you have for yourself, does not stretch to your body?s end. (Where, without preface, music trails, or your fingers slip from my arm
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