Far University

A lean challenge poem that turns rope, meter, and distance into a struggle over power, education, and class contempt.

A lean taunt aimed at the educated, where the 'far university' is glimpsed across a half-remembered distance - 'The was a place I see that was near / There must have been a time that was clear.' The speaker measures power and difference in rope and 'meter,' boasting 'I take power and cross bounds / Most take power and stay,' and closes with open contempt: 'I've seen you alll, / you collage bums.'

The poem stakes the working knowledge of knots and ropes against academic abstraction and finds the academy wanting. 'You give it a notch in a tight rope ... a hitch in a sail or a car' grounds the speaker's competence in handled materials, and 'Simple is not slight of wounds' insists his plainness is earned by injury, not naivety. The turn 'I'll change the meter as I please' lets him claim the poet's craft and the surveyor's measure in one word, then he dares the addressee to engage - 'toss your rope toward me / I'll strip you for you hang me.' The misspelled 'collage' for college may be accidental, but it reads almost as a swipe: their learning a mere pasted-together collage. The whole poem is a challenge from outside the gates, asserting that rope and meter are knowledge too.