The poet's joke

Does it matter if we don't get it?

I was very struck the other day by a poem by Michael Longley that Andrew Neilson posted on Twitter/X. The poem, which appeared in Longley’s 2000 collection The Weather in Japan, is called ‘Remembering the poets’, and it goes like this:

As a teenage poet I idolised the poets, doddery
Macer trying out his Ornithologia on me,
And the other one about herbal cu…