Shabby Proletarian Poetasters

Jun12

Today anyone can scribble prose onto a page, give it arbitrary line breaks and call it a poem. Infamously, the minor American poets Robert Creely and Robert Bly got away with doing this, spawning generations of MFA wannabes and imitators. The post-modernist poem, known across the great pond as the McPoem, is not anything that a sophisticated reader could actually admire as he or she would Shelly’s Ozymandias or Roy Campell’s The Zebras. Rather, in our shabby social democratic times, it is a proletarian poem that any poetaster or poetasteress can write and easily get published.

from: counter-currents.com

Strike the Prose

Jul5

I wonder sometimes
why droll observations;
recollections of a personal and
sometimes confessional nature,
(interesting enough in themselves – if well-written),
get called “poems” when broken up by
weird line spacing. Nothing against
descriptive prose –
but I don’t think it is truly
Poetry. You can call it that
if you want; I don’t
mind.

Autonomy in Catatonia

Apr17

A DELETED TEXT IN 3 MOVEMENTS:

I.
surfeited
fractured syllabub i babble
cyber-clot the glutted universal drain
awakening ruined dreamscapes
drenched in pre-verbal rain i run
to archive linguists
archaeology inundates desire
no caps
no guns
cowboys indianed
in the wounded dawn matinee
the double-featured matriarch
the humble daily heresy
unmanifest density

II.
fêted/fetid
dog-star of your corpse breath
hound tooth on hag flank
reveling ruined symmetries
mythologize nothing less than true
all parties ended
distilled the useless pistil
of prayer

III.
unsought arcana
sister-shroud immaculate
rough bolt-bearer of Lydian cloth
shoplifted theft of history
who wove you
into our self-deception
warped mother
of the weft

[just joking tee hee hee – I wanted to try my hand at writing some truly SUCKY modernistic free verse. The kind that we sometimes notice in the margins of famous reviews and that almost (almost) make us hate poetry. It took me 25 minutes. Thank the Lord, real poetry eventually came to my rescue and restored the wonder of the word again. No thanks to Modernism…]

Whence Cometh Bad Poetry ?

Dec8

The funny thing about it is that snobbery for so-called bad poetry comes now at a moment when the Internet seems to be forecasting a democratic comeback for poetry. All sorts of people are indulging in a pleasure for language, recording their breakups, the sound of the ocean, the majesty of the night sky, the changing of the seasons, and O so many other topics that would make an established workshop leader’s upper lip twitch itself into a snarl fit.