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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Earl's 186th Law. |
