Tuesday, March 28, 2006

It Would Be Easy

My poetry could be like everyone else's. I can complain about politics using no facts, no evidence, and no burden of truth. Instead of my art striving for this garbage, I strive for appeal outside the typical poetry crowd. All they want is a way to feel better than everyone else because they read a few poems that are obsolete and deadpan before the ink is dry. I don't care how many teenagers and wannabe, 37 year old teenagers at heart want a different man in office, and a different woman on the supreme court. In ten years, all that self-serving, masturbatory political trash will be over, done with and unread. Sure, Dante put Popes in hell, but he did it with style. Most poets I meet these days don't even know terza rima, and can't write a proper sonnet if their art's life depended on it (and often it does). Does anyone write poems about Benjamin Disraeli anymore? His novels are probably more popular than any of the crap poets dumped on his doorstep. I could be part of the crowd, and sell a chapbook primarily concerned with how much print I can make off other people's suffering and sacrifices, but that would be selling out. Someone is going to have to not ride the G.W. Bush bashwagon to save all our work from irrelevancy in 2008. I don't care what side of the fence any poet decides to make his home; I wish we could all just move on from move on and realize that putting ourselves in a litte box with only one open side facing the east leaves us with nothing to write about at sunset.

1 comment:

Xiporah said...

I know I am writing this months later, but I was reading some entries in your blog and came across this one.

I think you are right. There will always be so called 'poets' out there that somehow think that thier poetry is the absolute, unbiased, hard hitting political truth, and they will milk it for all it's worth before they find some new politician to hate.

I see three faces of them in 10 years.

On one side of this precarious triangle are the brand new poets. Filled with fresh rage over their new "love-to-hate" obsessions, they will mash out crappy line after line and throw it into the world with the appoximate pride of a young boy showing his mother a bug or toad he found in the back yard.

On another side, we have the older generation of these ruffians. They had their jabs at Bin Ladin, Bush, Bolton, Rice etc. They are still attempting to keep the 'fire' alive and trying to join the newer generation of ranters, but they keep falling back on their old work. They find themselves having to explain it more and more.

And on the last side, we have what is actually the strongest enemy of both sides. Not a political opposite. Not a well educated poet who writes a beautiful piece that reams them all, but a plethora of kids, ranging in age from 1-16 and from their side, we hear a echoing 'Who?'