Skip to main content

Reasons to Fuck Poetry





My my my. I found this in Absent recently, through someone's linkage, sorry I can't recall whose. Well worth a read if you've ever tried to ride ol' Poetry into the sunset. If ever you wanted to have hot hairy sex with a satyr, this piece is as close as you'll probably get. Hooraw.


1) Poetry invited you in earnest. Poetry sent you reams of sonnets, ballads, epics, soliloquies, each lingering on every word, drawing you out of yourself and in to another one, pulling you in, tempting you to hover over every syllable, first concealing and then revealing the whole of its nakedness from angry epiphany to epiphany. Poetry is very fuckable, and poetry wants badly to be fucked.



2) Poetry is tired of being confined by the society of those who are paid to do poetry. English professors, high-school English teachers, poetry librarians, and poets at writing workshops all do their best to define a canon of poetry. As paid lovers of poetry, they set a few of their close friends alongside the Bard, Goethe, and two or three multinational poets who are there to prove that they’ve done some homework. They publish in journals, and talk to middle-class, white students in the nation’s elite universities. These individuals, these self-made doyennes, who get paid to make love to poetry, nonetheless defy in their very institutional rigor the kind of open, unlaced escape that poetry has been trying to execute since at least MallarmĂ©. If they really loved poetry, they would be helping her do what she really wants to do, which is to remake society. Instead, they grow old and fat, drinking and smoking with a few of their contemporaries, rarely traveling, and never introducing her to new people. Poetry secretly hates them.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ed Dorn's # 22 From Twenty-four Love Poems

                                               from Jacket The strengthy message here in #22 of 24 Love Songs can be summed up in two lines: ['There is/no sense to beauty. . .' and '. . .How/ the world is shit/ and I mean all of it] What I also like about this brief poem is the interplay between the title of the book and the subject of the poems (love/anti-love (which is not hate)): it's all a mass of contradictions, like love. And I have to say that the shorter poems of the Love Songs and the last book he wrote before dying (Chemo Sábe) seem to me much better and more memorable than the Slinger/Gunslinger poems. These (generally) later poems probably attempt less stylistically, but are more sure-handed, hacked from a soap bar, maybe. Easy to use, but disappear after use. In any case, Dorn is well worth the reading and re-reading, for me, though he'll never become one of my favorites. And doesn't every poet want that, dead or alive? ;-) #22 The agony

Jim Daniels

Half Days My daughter, thirteen, pale shred of herself, fought an unidentified infection in her spine as it softened her discs into disappearance. I’d unread that story if she were young and still listened to lullabies. After she got discharged, I set an alarm for two a.m. each night to shoot antibiotics into her port while she slept, her limp arm resting in my hand. Her return to school: half days—follow my dotted line smearing across months of sleepless breadcrumbs— at noon I idled high, anxious in the school driveway rattling off the latest test results in the zero gravity of fear. She startled me with the brittle thunk of the car door slam, then snapped at me for staring at her friends as they strolled across the street to the cafeteria, creeping them out, she said, embarrassed by illness like hard acne or a blooming hickey, wrong music or flakey hair, or the tacky middle-school jumper she no longer had to wear. I was there to drive her to

Corey Mesler

  I think of you tonight, my Beats I think of you tonight, my Beats, and I am grateful.  I walked the narrow lanes of Academia and never felt at home. There were men and women in the flowerbeds, their heads full of theorems and poems. There were teachers who could lift their own weight in prose.  I was lonely. I was too loose.  I was a lad from the faraway country of Smarting. But I had you as so many before me. I had you and I knew secret things. I could count on you like a percussion. And now I want to say: I love you.  If not for you, what? I want to say. If Allen Ginsberg did not exist it would be necessary to invent him.  COREY MESLER has been published in numerous anthologies and journals including Poetry, Gargoyle, Five Points, Good Poems American Places, and New Stories from the South . He has published over 25 books of fiction and poetry. His newest novel, The Diminishment of Charlie Cain , is from Livingston Press. He also wrote the screenplay for We Go On , which won The Me