Weblog 33

September 14, 2006~ 10:00pm
Stayed home today with a stomach virus and slept most of it away, but I woke up to find cinders grinding into an old wound that I can't seem to let be- can't seem to just forget about because I see it as a sliding into the garbage culture that's so pervasive most folks accept it at face value- (and the 'value' is zilch- nada.) The harm however, is very great indeed.

Whoever said that any old shocking, embarrassing, personal thing is poetry because it's truthful? Who said the music of language and the making of mystery into something you can almost touch but not quite, has gone out of style and we are knee-deep in the shit we now christen as 'good writing'? This old gripe of mine continues because I see the wrong-headedness of so many being easily snookered by gurus of this growing 'sheitgeist'-- and it's GARBAGE, people. It's not soul-stripping, done with holiness and trembling, it is the slow, inexorable sliding into a sludgepot of greasy smoke and shock value and that is all....... ALL it is.

I bring this up because I saw today where a poet was chastized for not letting a poem 'leap off and have its way'- (meaning: "give me something so confessional, the rauch of my own experience will not trouble me so") and directly afterward appeared a poem about a child's masturbation and first menstrual period, and that one was garlanded like it'd won the Kentucky Derby! That just makes me see RED- (no pun intended, believe me.)

The original poem seemed to be what poetry is about-- that hiding in corners, sending out sparks; prying open the reader with incremental hints at a wisdom not from the writer, but the poem itself. Its language was good, the images surprising- but yes..... it lacked a naked, stink-filled bathroom- wide open, so the world could come have a look.

(And honest to pete, I've heard this poet say since-- I kid you not--"I've always loved my own stench." LOL!!)

My harping on this may seem pointless to you-- like someone trying to change the weather or something, but it's not a thing of little matter. It's an entire culture of writing that has grown up around the worship of what is so often profane or too personal- or just plain 'not the stuff to write a poem about'-- and it pulls us down into a rendered stew of what is basest-- what is there, certainly-- but basest in our experience of being alive; most of it triggered by the writers who have such promise, but they piss it away.

But the one thing that internet poetry writing has shown me is that it's no different than media news and what has always been known about capturing interest: if it bleeds, it leads. The magic formula is: sexual confession, violence, rant, and physical, tortured love.

Only afterward are subjects like contemplation and spiritual struggle, the simple observations of beauty or the nature of God- or meditations on dying, considered. (Oh they may be considered if you slip them in with the former subjects, but that dichotomy, with its jolting juxatposition is-

well-

just plain ugly.)

Ok, that's it.

I'm going to bed now.



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