Taking Poetry Seriously

"Decadence" comes from the Latin for "falling apart."

Question:

Is "flarf" like the following:

The farmer in the dell
The farmer in the dell
Ox chip gastrology
The farmer in the dell

The farmer takes a wife
The farmer takes a wife
Pupa reconnaissance
The farmer takes a wife


mere gallows humor?

Or have we not progressed in nearly a hundred years beyond Gertrude Stein?

That's right, flarfy folks--what you're doing was tried and tired way back in 1910. Note: it wasn't very interesting then, either.

It seems at least honest to me that many writers of free verse are gladly unlining their work--the current obsession with "prose poetry"--but when your work is (apologies to the Nepotist, for whom I have only the highest regard) best characterized as disjointed or wholly derivative (see the above "Farmer in the Dell" riff), in what way are you a poet?

I would prattle on about how poetry is a craft but that's not the point, actually.

The point is that poetry is not just the sound of words.

Nor is it just the juxtaposition of images.

The former is music and the latter is figurative language. The two by themselves do not create poetry.

Ah, but you say, they dooo--anything artsy is really "a poem."

Bull.

Our problem is that, inbred like royalty, we've lost all notion of perspective--instead of improving ourselves, we've taken on the affects of our most deformed relations--in the Spanish Court it resulted in the comical and delightfully kooky Cathtillian lithp. In poetry it's given us flarf and prose poetry and a host of other garbled crap.

And the garbled crap would be delightful if it weren't so pervasive--if it weren't lauded as an Emperor of invisible cloth. Admit you don't know what the hell you're doing--that you're just having fun and maybe that twitch in my eye will go away.

But people want to have serious discussions about the merit of reconstructed Shakespearean Sonnets. These things get anthologized and taught to kids who think--this is poetry? Fuck this shit.

And that's why I'm writing--not in a tawdry "won't someone think of the children" way but in a "let's think past our own noses" way.

When you write, imagine a non-poet reading your work. Hell, imagine a beginning reader reading your work--or someone who has never seen a poem. Your poem is the only poem they will ever see.

What message, what history does it transmit?

Or rather,

If your poem had to carry the weight of poetry, could it?