Scatterbrainstorming

    Earl the Squirrel's Rule #9

Question:  Other than their nationality and tendency to present dramatic, loquacious prose [qua] poetry, what do Allen Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, and Amiri Baraka have in common?

Answer:  All were shock jocks.  Poetry trolls.  They became well known not by entertaining or edifying people but by offending them.  Whether it was obscenity, misogyny, one of the -isms or "political incorrectness", it was the stuff of demagogues, appealing almost exclusively to adolescent males.  One did not like this rabble-rousing;  one either agreed with it vociferously or rejected it entirely.  Its hype centered around the persona, not the verses.  All hat, no cattle. 

     If we add Dr. Seuss into the mix we have a startling fact:  the four most successful "poets" of the last half century wrote exclusively for kids.  A doggerelist and three p[r]osers.

     Just to be clear, the "work" of these three Young Adult linebreakers wasn't awful because it failed to reflect everyone's politics.  Neither did "Easter, 1916" by William Butler Yeats.  It wasn't atrocious because it was lurid.  Consider Chaucer's "The Miller's Tale".  It wasn't meritless because of the "-isms".  In reflecting attitudes of his time Shakespeare has been accused of many of these.  It wasn't detritus because it lacked any hint of technique beyond crude anaphora.  Michael Ondaatje's "Sweet Like a Crow" was intentionally¹ cacophanous.

    

     Was the contribution of these PoetTrolls trash because of the way geeks treated it?

     No. 

 Earl the Squirrel's Rule #139

     It was shite because of the way its fans treated it.  Did they open online forums to discuss the text, as Usenetters did for Leonard Cohen?  Did they memorize, quote or perform it?  Did they get past its message to examine the individual words?  Or did they outgrow it, perhaps because, with experience, they encountered far more elegant and eloquent expressions of those sentiments?  Perhaps seeing a few hundred slammers scream the same polemics into a microphone got old quickly.

     Now we have the coal baron's son, emmerdeur Frederick Seidel, trivializing the tragedy at Ferguson² with his twentieth appearance in "The Paris Review³" since 2012.  This cryptocrap lacks even the maldramatic rhetoric found in other insulting forays.  It is word salad, the random, inchoate thoughts one might jot down before forming an outline, let alone a first draft. 

     It is scatterbrainstorming.  

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Footnotes:

¹ - We should bear in mind "Sweet Like a Crow" was prosey in order to make a point.  Sadly, others have made for an "aesthetic" out of this artlessness.  Worse yet, "Sweet Like a Crow" still sounds better than anything Bukowski ever wrote.  In other words, even with a concerted, deliberate effort an actual poet like Ondaatje cannot write as badly as a PoetTroll like Ginsberg, Bukowski, Baraka or Seidel.  It's a talent!

      For full effect, compare "Sweet Like a Crow" to "The Cinnamon Peeler".



² - Out of respect for all concerned, I won't dignify this with a link.

³ - I vote we sell "The Paris Review" back to the CIA.

     It was a far better poetry magazine then.

     I wish I were joking.

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Episode 4a - Poets Say the Funniest Things

DPK's "Beans"

      In "Where Have All The Poets Gone?" Juan Vidal wrote:  "For centuries, poets were the mouthpieces railing loudly against injustice."

      Actually, no, they weren't.  Not the poets we remember from when poetry had an audience, at least.  Drama, comedy, romance, elegy?  Sure.  Philosophy and religion?  Maybe.  Polemics?  For niche publishers, perhaps, but not as a general rule.  To be clear:  Mr. Vidal isn't saying "political" in the usual reductionist sense that everything is political (or dramatic, romantic or even humorous--whatever the pseudointellectual wants to argue).

      His example of "for centuries"?  "From Langston Hughes to Jack Kerouac..." leading to other contemporaries:  Pablo Neruda, Allen Ginsberg, and Amiri Baraka.

Garcia Lorca in 1914

      You couldn't guess his other example:  Federico del Sagrado Corazón de Jesús García Lorca (5 June 1898 - 19 August 1936).  In none of the theories about Lorca does anyone describe his body of work as "overtly political".  Lorca didn't consider it so, else he might never have left Madrid.  His Falangist friends and hosts didn't seem to have a problem with it.  Indeed, if the nationalists considered his poetry "overtly political" would it have taken them more than 30 minutes, let alone more than 30 days, to arrest and execute him?

      Needless to say, Mr. Vidal doesn't list examples of political pieces by Lorca.  Nor can anyone explain how badly one would have to misread Lorca's poetry before describing it as "overtly political".  Are we supposed to view "Llanto por Ignacio Sánchez Mejías" as...what?...a diatribe against bullfighting?

      Mr. Vidal continues unabated:  "At its root, poetry is the language of protest."

      Yes, that would explain the paeans, love sonnets, praise poems, non-satirical comedies, commercial jingles, bawdy limericks, and just about every canonical poem written before WWI.

      Do people actually think before they write these things?

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     "I want to die decently in my bed." - Lorca, in "Romance Sonambulo"

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The Voice of a Generation

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Want to make popularity based on sales as the criterion of poetic worth? Think about the following:

Bestselling poet in England between 1560 and 1640 (the era of Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and the early Milton, to name just a few) -- Thomas Tusser (he outsold most of those poets even when you take all their works sold during that period combined).

Bestselling English poet between 1890 and 1914 (era of Housman, late Tennyson and Browning, Hardy, and numerous others of note) -- Norman Rowland Gale.

     - Howard Miller (Gazebo, 2007-03-19)

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      Fifty years ago, among poets, the "voice of a generation" would probably be the Beat poet of your choice, most likely Allen Ginsberg.  Today, it could be a slammer, probably Shane Koyczan, if only because, in a rare moment when the world experienced poetry (if we can call it that), he did slightly better at the 2010 Olympics than Elizabeth Alexander or Richard Blanco fared at Obama's inaugurations.  If nothing else, at least one person was animated by Koyczan's performance:  Koyczan himself.

      You think this is a frightening thought?  Consider this:  the alternative is that today's poets don't have a voice. In any event, comparing Ginsberg to Koyczan, it is clear that poetry's voice is nowhere near as prominent or clearly defined as it has been in the past.

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #56

      Being the voice of a generation will help your pocketbook but, as Howard Miller indicates, it won't further your chances of leaving anything behind.  The very qualification, "of a generation", suggests that our children will find someone else to speak for them, leaving us to be forgotten.  Still, by targeting a younger audience the poet may enjoy twenty years of fame followed by forty years of nostalgia.  Not a bad gig, really.

      By emphasizing advocacy rather than artistic value, "voice of a generation" also implies that the work is lacking in technical merit.  Not surprisingly, onliners and geeks could produce a very different list of greatest contemporary poets than Page or Stage poets might.

      Imagine that era, 1560 and 1640, without the likes of those poets Mr. Miller mentions:  "Sidney, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Herbert, and the early Milton, to name just a few."  What if they'd never been born, never picked up a pen or never attracted notice?  Thomas Tusser would the best poet of that time!  Instead of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets we could be reading verse like:

A foole and his monie be soone at debate,
which after with sorrow repents him too late.

      Why, we might be quoting such epic epigrams as:

Who quick be to borrow and slow be to pay,
their credit is naught, go they ever so gay.

      [We pause to shudder.]

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #24

      In fact, that could be a reasonable assessment of our current situation.  To the vast majority, including the [fiction] reading public, Alexander, Blanco and Koyczan might not just be the best active poets they know, they may well be the only active poets they know.

      There are no Shakespeares alive today, keeping theatres open with their verse and forcing us to forget the Thomas Tussers of our era.  No poet is changing our language or adding a single phrase to our idiom.  Yes, there are a few great poets around but the public can't name one and the cognicenti can't agree on many.  This may create a vacuum in our present environment and a dead spot in poetry's history. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #19

      Every failed poet chants the Emily Dickinson Myth as a mantra, telling themselves that their work, so cruelly ignored during their lives, will be discovered and loved by future fans.  Leave aside the fact that Emily was directly solicited twice by the Atlantic Monthly's Editor-In-Chief for submissions (which hardly sounds like a "nobody" to me).  There is a critical piece missing:  It is one thing to emerge from obscurity when poetry outsold prose;  it is quite another to emerge from obscurity in an era when all poetry is being ignored.  This is even more obvious if all subsequent generations continue to ignore poetry, as this one does.

     Put simply, why should future generations take an interest in us when we ourselves don't?

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