The folks running the London 2012 Olympics are Fascist Ninnies!

N.B.: The following is a bit of a political post, spurred on by the previous actions of the London Olympics folks and this post by Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing. I mean, really, folks--learn how the internet works and, moreover, respect your customers--that is, your fellow humans.

Hey, 2012 Olympics Schultzstaffel! I'm linking to you RIGHT HERE! You suck and your policies suck and you should feel bad!

Note: I hope the individual athletes do well. I love swimming & gymnastics. But the committee and all those in charge can sod right off.

P.S. Now in September, I can say, sadly, I only got to see water polo. It wasn't a very good summer.

Wishy-Washiness in Poetry

Oh Crist.

Note: most of this post has nothing to do with Eliot or his lack of depth -- just how poets respond to each other.

So I'm a browsin' on them interwebs and I come across some ridiculousness about Eliot having a lack of depth. Apart from this being utterly ridiculous, people were disagreeing with idocies such as:

"I think poetry is too personal to dismiss any one poet as overrated. If it doesn't speak to you, then it doesn't, and I don't believe you should force it. But don't look down on other people who do see beauty in the words."

Seriously -- Oh Charlie Crist what is wrong with you people?

Perhaps much of the problem lies here, but surely we CAN NOT believe that poetry being "too personal" makes it immune to all criticism? The above quote represents everything evil and rotten about today's poetry.

Wishy-washies think that every fart is sacred, especially when it comes at the end of a pen. This applies not only to their own egotistical fartings but, in an insane sociopathic form of egalitarianism, to every one else's farts as well. Even when you can tell the work stinks to high heaven, there is still some onus to labeling it as excrement.

Why is this?

Apart from the reference above, I think it has to do with two ideas:

One -- don't insult the establishment. I have just done this. Ronnie is pretty much established. You don't want to do this because they control all the gates of publishing and the keys to the kingdom of being a "poet." This is hogwash. If you are unsure of this, read below.

Two -- that saying, out of hand, "this work is terrible -- it is not only not poetry but it is not even literature" somehow means you "don't understand" the work. Let me tell you -- if someone has to explain their poetry to a literate person (one of the 100 million Americans who read 2 or more books a year) then THEY ARE DOING SOMETHING WRONG. Perhaps they are not writing poetry. Perhaps they are clouding their lack of talent in the smoke and mirrors of academia, shock value, and pretension.

Perhaps the Emperor has no clothes.

The problem with this approach is that, as I have said before, once "anything" can become poetry, "everything" is poetry. Which means that nothing is. Just like Syndrome wanting to give superpowers to everyone, the dilution of what poetry means means that poetry means nothing.

So -- for today, after you read this blog and send it to your friends and continue the discussion about how to revive narrative poetry and kill off all the over-formulaic lyric verse we have now,
think about how we can disengage ourselves from the weak-language of faux-egalitarianism and begin to write criticism in a way that has meaning.

GMP

A Break for Horsemanure

Yesterday I had a lovely conversation with one of the most brilliant young poets you could meet about her recent experiences in grad school (forgive the link being prose).

We got to talking about "experimental stuff --you know, the work where you have to read the poet's criticism about her work to "get" the subversive, social message in her poems. Cf. Leslie Scalapino, Lyn Hejinian, et al. Not only does their criticism elucidate their brilliant work, it also explains why any poetry with a coherent narrative is mostly worthless and contributes to oppressive social systems."

Well, we know how I feel about this sort of "poetry". But I felt compelled to dig a little deeper into the "we hate actual poetry" school of writing -- these two poets in particular. I came up with this, from the above Scalapino link:

"Taking the view that “the self is a guinea pig”(2) (and herein I’m creating a foil) in considering presentation of ‘one’s/other’s bodies’ in writing, I will try to see the relations between ‘our bodies’ and ‘future’ in an example from my early writing, that they were at the beach, not because I’m so attached to that early work but because it was written in the period of radical as ‘communal’ language writing(3)). I’m only speaking of the San Francisco Language scene; I think New York Language scene was very different. A description of that writing of mine is only possible in hindsight, though when writing it I had a sense (a ‘feeling’) of what I’ll here describe. As writing, one can’t conceive of a future without changing the past and present. Corporal body and the future are separated, detached, though the body must be there for there to be an individual’s future (maybe there can’t be sense of body without sense of future?). The body must happen simultaneous in order to invent the future."

For those of you who don't read "Marxese," let me elucidate: "we can only experiment on our own work but we can't understand what we're doing until the moment has passed but that's okay, because we always change the past and invent the future." Before I tear into the idiocy of this premise, let me first point something out, if some person thinks that Marxese is the way to talk:

NO ONE FUCKING UNDERSTANDS THIS BULLSHIT AND IT MAKES YOU LOOK ARROGANT AND STUPID, NOT INTELLIGENT AND EDGY

(now, I understand that being arrogant and foulmouthed may hurt my position a little but I here claim for all time that I am being all meta- and ironic. Marxese speakers make no such claim)

Okay, now that that part of the rant is over, let me continue:

First, it's obvious that we can only experiment with our own work (our "selves as guinea pigs" or whatever) -- if we are doing anything to something someone else did (say, erasing words in Parasise Lost) we instantly make it our own. So -- for point one -- "duh."

The second point -- that we don't understand what we've done till we've done it -- um. No. Sorry -- we may better understand what we've done after the fact, but this line of reasoning excuses all sorts of badness -- from bad writing to violent acts. You can't ever make me believe that a murder just doesn't know what he's doing until a week later. You know what you are writing. Even if you don't know what its influence in the world will be, you have a pretty good idea of what you want it to be.

The third point I take more (if possible) exception with than the first. We may always be redefining the past, but we cannot change it. We can only change our perception of it. As much as postmodern poets rail against Milton, they can't change a word he wrote, any more than I can erase all of the damage they've done to poetry. We can change what Paradise Lost means, but we can't change what it says, and the two are much more different than some people would like to admit. As far as inventing the future goes -- bah. We contribute a ripple but its mysterious algorithms seem to have a deathgrip on what happens.

Well, this has gone on for a while. My main point is that if someone is speaking like this they are hiding something. Generally it is a lack of all reason and talent. Be afraid.

Fark Lyric Poetry

Fuck lyric poetry.

Yes, that's right. For damn near a century and a half now, English verse in general and American verse in specific has been in the stranglehold of lyric verse.

When was the last time you read a narrative poem? Any of you read Omeros? When was the last time? When, in fact, was the last time you read a narrative poem written after Queen Victoria Died? One that wasn't a damn book?

Yeah. That's what I thought. And yet, where do all the great poetry quotes come from? Not from Sappho, that's for sure. From narrative poems (and verse drama -- thanks Nuncle), that's where. Sure, we may love us some T.S. Eliot and some Sylvia Plath, but those are mood setting pieces -- and besides, at least for Sylvia, she sells more when she's a'narratin' (Eliot does too, when his work is bastardized into a story-line).

So you sit reading through and writing terrible lyric poetry and you wonder why no one loves you.

Because lyric poetry is fucking useless.

Unless your entire life is based on being some pathetic emo kid, the lyric won't get you far (and even Keats wrote narratives, y'all). Sappho sucks, the reason we have western culture is named Homer, and we poets better wake up to that fact or we will be about as relevant as Jazz.

That's all.
Just a damn rant.
I'll come back later to rant some more.

Go think about politics and wars and write something that tells a story or get the hell off the pen.

Peas,
GMP