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| Love the Sin, Hate the Sinner |
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| Poets and Poetry |
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This is Dark Cloud on Monday, June 22, 1998. I have just recently finished a slight book called “Words for the Taking” about a poet from Ames, Iowa whose work, among other poets, was plagiarized. They finally track down the person, who promptly flees overseas, and the poet is finally rewarded with the knowledge that the thief is a convicted child molester, which apparently grants a certain amount of satisfaction. The author wants us to know that, even though remuneration for poems is often as much as two dollars a line plus a free copy of the Ringworm and Udder Review, it is the sense of…..well, violation that inflames him. In general, he does a good job of trying to keep a sense of humor and proportion about the affair, but he stumbles - being a poet - over the immensity that is his own ego. In what is, after all, a very small prose book that proclaims itself a detective mystery to boot, far too much time is spent on sentences that begin something like “Poets are….,” Which in his case is also saying “I am….” It is annoying, because it suggests the non-inclusion of another, less precious and hypocritical phrase, to wit: “I am – unlike a prose writer….” something wonderful. Sensitive, alert, carefully recording the thoughts of our species in terms so beautiful only we and others like us are fit to share. Let me be the first to admit that while I admire good writing and am not immune to the subtlety of metaphor or the joys of irony, or even of rhythmic writing, I generally despise poetry. No, that’s wrong. Bad poetry, I hate that. Well, while true, that’s not it either. It’s... it’s... it’s the bloody poets I hate, sort of an ironic – note that, please - reversal of the Pleistocene Christian views on gays: I accept and appreciate the sin, which is poetry. I detest the sinner. That’s wrong, too. I read poetry but generally want to take the precious body of the lamentably no-longer-tubercular author, fill it full of expensive drugs to bring every neuron to Def-Con 8, strap this progeny of Homer, Sappho, and Yeats to a gurney and use it for small caliber, underpowdered projectile analysis. No. That’s too good for them. To feed the ants. No, better! To be forced to attend poetry readings seven nights a week of other poets and have to applaud them. I suppose in a town with a college pretty much dedicated to what is called disembodied poetics my opinion is, alas, in the minority. Still, the few times I have spent listening to Boulder’s poets has only firmed up my thesis, which is that 90% of the poets featured at any given evening of readings are functionally illiterate, incapable of composing a complete sentence, cannot spell, cannot sustain a narrative thought, cannot imagine a world where they are not important. Seven percent of the remaining may or may not write well, but they cannot and should not be allowed to speak before others not fascinated by dental pathology, and the remaining 3% are probably pretty good but I’ve always left by then. Dismal evenings, as a rule. Which brings me back to the Whitman of Ames, the Iowan Tennyson. My problem is that I liked this particular work of his which was about a late family member, and I could easily understand the personal sense of insult he would feel if someone else had tried to pass it off as his own. And yet, my animosity to poets is such it took me a while to come around to that position. And so, I’ve had to revisit and hone what it is that drives me bananas about poets. It started, of course, with a college roommate whose advance degree hinged upon the success of his thesis, which was The Use of the Invocative Muse in the Poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, who wrote something called The Seagull. Like all late male Victorian poetry, Hopkins seemed decidedly homosexual not too far below the surface if that deep, and it was considered a little whiffy even by his peers. Listening to precious, coy phrasings drives me batty, since I much prefer honest (and heterosexual)pornography to the thinly disguised type of repressed Catholic sodomites. So listening to this gunk recited incessantly overcame all love I had for the poetry of childhood and did not nudge aside all the beauty I was currently receiving from song lyrics. In the old days, the people called poets were the historians, doctors, spin-doctors, shamans, and pop song idols of their day. The reason, obviously, is that they had mastered the memorization techniques of rhyme and meter, and applied them for cash to healing and puffing up the local slaughters of their chieftain. When language could be written by significant numbers of people, the role of the poet deteriorated until today they really offer little more than mood music and catch phrases for entertainment value, and it is an open question if they deliver on even that. Yet, those who call themselves poets refuse to give up claims to the reverence and prestige due Homer. They are poets because they say they are, not because they offer anything unique to others not offered by allegedly less arty prose. And their poetry is worthy because they are poets. So there. |
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