Most poets now are boring clowns
Meandering, confessional;
Their muses quick to pawn their crowns
Claiming to be professional;
Credentialed by some stuffy place
That ruined all poetic grace.
Miss Chang is one. The current breed:
Murmuring, sighing in her tea—
Exhibiting neurotic need
To tell sad stories. Let her be.
She’s found her niche. She does her schtick
Repeating endlessly one trick.
We note the symptoms and the signs:
Turning dull maudlin thoughts to prose,
Then making of it ragged lines
(Post-modern sickness clearly shows.)
But adding line-breaks here and there
Is simply prose in disrepair.
Poor dear, it’s clear she dwells in grief
(And follows funerals to the bank…)
We realize, with some relief
It’s not her fault. We have to thank
The avant-boring visionaries
Praising her obituaries;
Milquetoast academic schools
Of well-degreed neurotic fish
Who spawn such vapid bubbling fools
As fit for neither hook nor dish.
And thus, we’re left with Rupi Kaur
In this, the muses’ dullest hour.
To say simply that Chang takes poetic medication and goes to sleep for us, makes it soporific, is to shed unrequited tears in your chamomile tea, for she truly ruins it, pours tepid water on what was left of the fire. This stunningly brave new poetry is prose, yes, but it is prose broken into weird lines of fake verse.
Willya KwitsubsidizingNPR
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