Anti-Aesthetics

     If you've ever turned on a television or radio you will know that beauty sells, regardless of whether it has significant content or not.  If you add up the successes of prose with linebreaks--all none of them--you will see that even the most profound thought disguised as poetry fools no one.  One might think this would be self-evident:  those bright enough to appreciate the subtleties of meaning would certainly be clever enough to know that these can be obtained elsewhere with infinitely more artistry.  Thus, there is no audience (not only due to the lack of rhythm or sonic appeal) and readership is limited to those trying to sell, not necessarily buy, musings of similar "quality". 

     Even with $253,000,000+ behind them, the Poetry Foundation, established in 2003, hasn't produced a single poem that you, I, or others have found memorable--certainly not one with any performance appeal.  You can't buy readers, let alone listeners.  How many times have you seen anyone quote from a poem in Poetry Magazine this century?

     There is a Goth aspect to postmodernism.  It isn't merely devoid of aesthetic merit, as one expects from anyone too lazy to study prosody.  It is Convenient Poetics on steroids.  Incapable of beauty, the purveyors of cryptocrap become imbued with a puritanical fervor against it.

     It is as if envy became a virtue, failure a sacrament.

     Very strange.

A Third Mode of Speech Discovered!

     In the beginning there was prose.  Its purpose was to convey information:  either truth and/or useful fiction (e.g. sagas, myths, fables, et cetera).  Argument and opinion soon followed.

      Later, poetry was developed to preserve words in memory.

     Not until this century did a third mode of speech appear.

LieJacking

      This new meta-category is the opposite of both previous modes.  It is used exclusively for diversion and obfuscation, if not outright mendacity, and/or for useless blather.  Even as it is being uttered, both speaker and listeners seem to be putting in considerable effort to forget it. 

      The intent is not to follow a subject, or even to change it, but to kidnap the conversation away from any modicum of coherence or relevance.  It is not merely some nascent form of cryptocrap.  It is not just the illiterati's attempt at postmodernism.  It is the verbal equivalent of anti-matter.

      "...you've neglected the basic need of making sense."

        - Margaret Ann Griffiths (Eratosphere, 09-21-2007)

The Rise of CryptoCrap

Earl Gray's 2nd Law

     Half a century ago grade six students were taught basic scansion, meaning that they understood the elements of poetry better than most English PhDs today.  Because these college graduates cannot speak, let alone authoritatively, about the rudiments of verse, they need to focus on interpretation instead of intrinsic merit.

    This gave us obscure texts which professors could waste entire semesters "analyzing".  It has become a co-dependency, a causation spiral of incoherence and tenuous inference.  It spawned two generations of "experts" with no knowledge of or interest in learning the definition, let alone the elements, of poetry.

Earl Gray's 77th Law.

     CryptoCrap was born out of the ashes of poetry's funeral pyre.  It was the perfect solution:  easy to produce, easy to find, impossible to define.  One could, for example, use software to translate it back and forth into foreign languages until the syntax was sufficient distorted to call it "postmodern poetry".  The fact that it had no artistic, entertainment, technical, performance, or educative value didn't seem a problem.  That no one, including the author, bothered to perform it was lost on prose mongers, as was the existence of poetry as a mode of speech.  Magazines and English teachers had an infinite, ready supply of word puzzles to ponder, disseminate, and discuss.  It was easy for pseudointellectuals too lazy to learn whether "The Red Wheelbarrow" is free verse or metrical to "philosophize" endlessly about its meaning.  (Hint:  It is not "written in a brief, haiku-like free-verse form.")  This passed for "literary criticism":  an absurd notion that arid brain droppings are inherently superior to adolescent heart farts.

     Disinterested readers saw through this pretense and gave up on poetry (other than song lyrics).  Yes, the majority of poetry geeks are still academics but they are an endangered subspecies of literary scholars.  In truth, the average English teacher or professor today probably couldn't conduct a lesson without descending into annotation.  (Pro Tip:  Get your students involved by scanning their favorite songs.)

     As always, the antidotes to gaslighting remain education and reason.

Earl's 186th Law.