Show Some Respect!

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #112

cento:  Poetry made up of lines borrowed from a combination of established authors, usually resulting in a change in meaning and a humorous effect.

found poem:  A poem created from prose found in a non-poetic context, such as advertising copy, brochures, newspapers, product labels, etc. The lines are arbitrarily rearranged into a form patterned on the rhythm and appearance of poetry.

    Thus, the found poem derives from sources outside literature.  It follows that the cento tends to be drawn from novels, songs, films or other poems.  In both cases, though, they are presented in a poetic form, which may include open form (i.e. free verse or prose poetry).

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Earl the Squirrel's Rule #24

    Think of the last few times the public might have been exposed to the toxic radiation of "poetry".  In 2009 we saw Elizabeth Alexander's crowd-clearing "Praise Song for The Day", which gave birth to Rule #24.  This was followed up four years later with Richard Blanco's "One Today", which seems to have taken a day to deliver.  More recently, people may have been trolled by Frederick Seidel's "The Ballad of Ferguson, Missouri".  Before him, Kenneth Goldsmith was reading baseball commentary and newspaper clippings to the POTUS and First Lady.

    "Why call raw prose poetry?" you ask.  "Doesn't prose sell a thousand times better?"

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #25

     Yes, but not if it is tedious.  Anything as banal as Seidel's braindroppings or Goldsmith's mind-numbingly inartistic random text is too dull for prose;  it can only be sold to pseudo-sophisticates as "poetry".  In fact, substitute "the actual words" for "reading the actual work" and this becomes the very definition of prose:

    "His work is about the ideas (read:  Content Regency) and discussions that it generates (read:  offense or antagonism it provokes), rather than about reading the actual work the actual words.

     Let's not miss the progression here.  I'll grant you that Ms. Alexander and Mr. Blanco are both profoundly lazy, untalented individuals but at least they aren't trolls.  They didn't mean to permanently lower our metabolisms by boring us stiff¹. 

     More disturbing is the defeatist, exploitative attitude toward poetry's moribund condition. 

Earl the Squirrel's Rule #19

    Mr. Goldsmith says:  "One of the great tragedies of poets is that they assume they are being read, and they are not. So why not assume there will be no readership and give great concepts to think about instead?"

    In essence, he has reduced Rule #19 to the absurd.  The implication is that since Nobody Reads Poetry it doesn't matter how bad it is.  We can't argue with that logic and, sadly, we must concede that this is the prevailing [anti-]aesthetic today.  It is a cornerstone of Convenient Poetics.  As for what qualify as "great concepts", we won't bother arguing with someone who seems to think he invented the found poem and that excerpting from sports broadcasts and newspapers constitutes plagiarism.  [It was legal when Lenny Bruce did it in the early 1960s and remains so today.] 

    The flaw in his "thinking" is that it applies general truths (e.g. Rule #19, Nobody Reads Poetry) not just to specific circumstances but to ones known to be exceptional.  Unfortunately, folks did hear those inaugural poems.  Many did read [about] Seidel trivializing the tragedy at Ferguson.  If not the people, their elected representatives in Washington did have to suffer through Goldsmith's silliness.  There was not a single line of poetry in any of the four presentations but the art form was publicly humiliated nonetheless.

    Looking at it now, we wouldn't guess that poetry was once alive and vibrant within our culture.  Still, there is something cowardly and, yes, sacrilegious about kicking its corpse.

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Footnotes:

¹ - Almost literally so, given the temperature.

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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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-Isms

Sayre's law:  "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake."  See also:  "The politics of the university are so intense because the stakes are so low."  See also Hutchin's Law:  "The reason the politics of poetry are so vicious is that the stakes are so low."

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    We laugh when we think of the New England theater critic who allowed that Shakespeare wasn't awful, adding "I doubt we have six of his ilk in all of Boston!"

    We stop laughing when we think that there may have been six poets of Shakespeare's ilk somewhere in the anglophone world who weren't recognized because of their class, gender, ethnicity, religion, color, nationality, location, age, or politics.  Economic elitism, sexism, racism, nationalism, regionalism, cronyism, and ageism are only a few of the extraneous factors ("-isms") standing between merit and hype, between art and fad.

    Optimists, including me, argue that the democratizing Internet will eventually ameliorate, if not eliminate, these -isms.  For now, the septuagenarian son of a coal baron can still get any dreck published, even if it trivializes a tragedy (as all indolent writing does).  Yes, even if it is to prose-qua-poetry what "The Tay Bridge Disaster" was to verse. 

    "Which -ism is operating there?" you ask.

     In this case, a better question might be:  "Which one isn't?"

     In my experience, the "New Yorker" poem marks a point of no return.  That is, I cannot cite one worthwhile poem produced by a poet or editor after abandoning merit as the sole criterion for art.  Instead, there only -isms to choose from.  As for the public, why should readers take poetry seriously if writers and publishers don't?

     Arguably the most insidious and virulent -isms are those relating to geography.  Many who vehemently oppose sexism and racism will rally around a neighbor over any outlander.  This favoritism is easily institutionalised.  Because Nobody Reads Poetry, verse often relies on government funding.  At the civic level, the town's Art Council will ensure that all contracts go to local residents.  National organizations can be downright protectionist.  Flags become blindfolds.  It doesn't help when a well-known Content Regent explicitly endorses this myopia, going so far as to recommend 20 compatriots' poems based entirely on their--you guessed it--subject matter and polemics.

     As an aside, when did confirmation bias become an aesthetic?  How long before England is the only country still teaching Shakespeare to high schoolers?  Or has that boat already sailed?

     Something more basic is at work here.  The three best poets of our time are female but only the American one is recognized.  What gives?  If chauvinism is so pervasive why aren't the other two celebrated in their countries?  Granted, sexism could explain all three, since A.E. Stallings had to use her initials before editors would publish her work, but all three nations have promoted inferior poets of the same gender.  Modesty?  The other two were, indeed, pathologically shy but that doesn't explain why periodicals refused to publish Maz's obituary.  No.  Pare away the distractions.  Only one suspect remains, one that is at the heart of all prejudice.

     Stupidity.

     Worse yet, we're not talking about the run-of-the-mill idiocy we see on Faux Snooze.  We're talking about the two strains that infest and infect the pseudo-intellectual community:  disingenuousness and wilful¹ ignorance.  It is the blithe non sequitur, "Everyone is writing poetry!", parroted by sycophants when informed of poetry's demise.   It is the insipidity of editors not caring to learn the elements of poetry.  It is the spectacle of an "expert" who didn't know "Beans" was an iambic pentameter acrostic, let alone who it was about, but tells us what poems children should be learning based on, of all things, his interpretive ability.  It is like the inanity of racists and homophobes watching voting rights and marriage equality sweep the United States, oblivious to the fact that the world is changing for the better.

     The good news comes in the irony that, by definition, progress permits no bystanders.  It benefits everyone, including, if not especially, those who opposed it.

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Footnotes:

¹ - ...similar to the kind that makes some think "wilful" is misspelled.  Incidentally, the etymology of the word "misspelled" dates back to 1645-1655, making it among the first words that could be misspelled.  Before that, without the Gutenberg press (1450) or dictionaries (1604?  1755?), "standard spelling" was an oxymoron.

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