EastWesterly
Review

You’re OK: I’m a Bean
by E.W. Wilder

Arising from Bean Newton’s exposure to self-help books after his third hospitalization for clinical repression, the series of poems from which these are excerpted show an influence of the pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-zen approach so popular in that genre from the 1970s forward. Newton’s poem is both homage and spoof, I suppose, but it penetrates deeply into the both the self-help idiom and the facile truth it contains.

Bean Sélavy
by Bean Newton

In the men’s room at the place I work, there are two urinals. One was built by a genius, and it is beautiful, singular. The other was built by an idiot, and it is artless and crude. When I pointed this out to a friend, he exclaimed with some astonishment, “But they look just the same!”

“Yes,” I said, “they do. But I interpret them differently.”

 

Continue to The Jolly Bean Giant (Ho-Ho-Ho) - Or A Piece of Advice

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