"Contra Dante (Kind Of)" by Bill Coyle

Mea culpa regarding the scansion of line 29: I should've mentioned that you could also very reasonably interpret this as an acephalous iambic line. My bad. I like the trochees better though! 

Topics discussed in this episode include: 

-Dante's Purgatorio 
-"The God of This World To His Prophet" 
-Swedish skalds Hakan Sandell and Tomas Transtromer 
-Dante's tropical vacay 
-How Virgil and Moses are alike 
-Terza Rima 
-Dante's numerical obsession/magnificence 
-Hendecasyllabics 
-The Beatific Vision 
-A pun which only works perfectly in American English 
-Rhythm vs. Meter, Stress vs. Accent 
-The Book of Isaiah 
-Parallelist verse 
-Parallelist verse graphic: https://web.cn.edu/kwheeler/documents/hebrew_poetry01.pdf 
-The influence of biblical poetry in English via the KJV 
-Robert Alter's "Pen of Iron" 
-Moliere and irony (see especially "The Misanthrope") 
-The death of the personality in heaven 
-You know I had to bring in Aquinas 
-God as Actus Purus 
-If there's life after death, there is no death 
-We desire not heaven but more earthly life 
-Bill "Mr. Steal Your Girl" Coyle slides into Beatrice's DMs 
-Marlowe and Marvell 
-Nietzsche's Eternal Recurrence 
-How much do you love your life? 

Text of poem: 

Contra Dante (Kind Of) 

Forget about the Beatific Vision. 
Not that it’s not impressive in its glory 
and worthy of a god in God’s position, 

but if I make it to Mount Purgatory 
(and yes, that’s one big “if,” I realize) 
and trudge my way up story after story 

I’ll settle in the Earthly Paradise 
located at the top, it being more, 
well, earthly, which is better in my eyes. 

Earthly perfection’s what I’m looking for: 
the world I know, more or less as I know it, 
prolonged, minus the death and pain and gore 

(hard to imagine, maybe, but read the poet 
Isaiah on the lion and the lamb). 
If I found that, there’s no way I’d outgrow it, 

even if I grew holier than I am 
(not the I AM, but I as I am now). 
Can I be honest? I don’t give a damn 

if I miss most of the celestial show 
(it will go on like clockwork whether I 
am there or not) so long as far below 

(which, from where I stand now, is still on high) 
I can sit down under an actual tree 
on actual grass beneath an actual sky 

of blue that as it dro