National Poetry Month: Does Poetry Suck?

Pablo Picasso, 1901-02, Le bock (Portrait de Jaime Sabartes), The Glass of Beer (Portrait of the Poet Sabartes), oil on canvas, 82 x 66 cm, Pushkin Museum, Moscow - Source: Wikipedia.

Tonight, it’s Brahms and testicular cancer. No, wait. It’s gum disease. It’s the Phillies getting shellacked on a Sunday afternoon in Miami after an all-night coke binge. It’s sassafras roots in your rhododendron soup.

Alas, a jar of pickles falls to the ground and shatters as dogs go on barking into the night under a full moon sky. I just lit some incense to attract mas dinero. And my belly is full of Indian food (spicy fish curry, rice, and pita bread).

I ate dinner with two angels. One was in a bright red dress with yellow sunflowers and no bra. The other was an astrologer yogi actress, her friend.

We sat stunned and watched the Indian/Bollywood music videos.

“Is it a music video?”

“No, it’s from a movie they made.”

“What a production!”

I had my arm around Ophelia. Earlier in the day, we’d risen together in my bedroom, and by risen I mean bang-bang. “Listen, babe,” I’d said, “let’s make this quick, a baby moved in next door…”

Only I didn’t say it like that and left her wondering at the ceiling (and me too) what it might be like to get up on a Sunday afternoon totally unsatisfied. We snoozed, somewhat.

Then she tried again and rubbed my balls for good luck. It worked.

Later, we decided to take a walk up the street and get breakfast out by the beach. We sat down together at a table and I stared at the blue reflecting sunlight of the vast and dying ocean, the Pacific. We ate and had our coffee and shared an orange juice. Then we started chatting about politics.

She reminded me of an assassination that was supposed to be suspicious of a former president in Ecuador — and then I told her about a CIA plane that you could visit at a restaurant in Costa Rica. In these moments, life becomes worth writing about.

You have to live. So I paid for the breakfast and we walked together to the nearby taxi stand. She stood in the shade. The cab came. I kissed her on the cheek. “Have a good day, baby.”

Writers have strange lives. And it’s especially strange to be invisible and that’s often what it takes to get your work done. Nobody’s going to do it for you. And in a place like this, the writing hasn’t been getting done because life gets in the way. And poets don’t understand the difference in America between living and dying. They wouldn’t know death if it shit itself and they were the ones who had to clean it up.

If that doesn’t make any sense, then welcome to Poetry 101.

I put a daffodil into my
pancake and then
I took a spoonful of
maple syrup
and rubbed it across my tongue
and
sneezed

ACHO!

the Earth tumbled and the moon groaned
and I spit out another daffodil
and everybody
screamed — 

Poetry in the modern era is useless because that’s what poets are. I wouldn’t call myself a poet. Unless I was trying to be self-aggrandizing. Just the thought gives me the shudders. Who reads poetry?

So later in the afternoon, I wrote a few poems. Like an architect standing on a bridge that hasn’t even been built yet.

And I sent them off. Just like the other night, I finished a horror story for a fiction contest that was meant to be based on a film. I don’t write horror.

But I should’ve written it about a cop who writes poetry. The horror…

Writing poetry is as bad as it sounds. And I am of course talking about American poetry. Because the American poets collapsed under the weight of their own over-thinking and lack of progress. Everything now is about death and despair and dysfunction. They don’t want to be ridiculed so nobody steps out of the lines of what came before. And of course, what came before a dead art was more death, to begin with. They just used fancy words and degrees as a facade for their lack of ingenuity or original thoughts.

The designs are better. Don’t get me wrong. The books look nice. And everybody’s so nice. Didn’t you know that? HE is nice and SHE is nice and THEY are nice and THEM is nice too. The poets smile on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

Here’s a poem:

The soul dies
a certain
death
whenever
I log in to

TikTok. wait, let me
go and get
my
TikTok shirt, it’s pink — I’m a poet

in my

own

mind, but

where

did it

go?

And other fallacious instrumentation of releasing noxious gases out of the lower intestines…

It’s not that poetry is dead, but that the corpse has been painted with lipstick. It’s got bad aftershave, stockings with holes in the knees, lip rings, a pierced nose, bad tattoos, and a small bank account.

Poets need their friends because their friends have real jobs. And that’s America’s art scene for you.

Poetry is one of the lowest art forms because self-congratulatory aplomb has replaced anything moving, meaningful, magical, or artistic. Constant communication has made everything and everybody one and the same.

And that is not art, that is not poetry. The last bastion came from the Beats (in America) and they were telling the world to go, get and BE anti-establishment.

There are scarcely any anti-establishment poets anymore because to be dangerous in a world of sick, sad ghosts means to rant on social media about something bad that happened to YOU.

There are poets in Nigeria. There are poets in Sudan. There are poets in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and somewhere in Pakistan, a young girl is scribbling in a notebook just to say something she’s not allowed to say OUT LOUD. That’s poetry.

Poetry is a street full of marching protesters aimed at scaring the shit out of the Establishment.

Poetry is not for the locking of arms WITH the protectors of the PEACE, so-called. How can there be a world of peace to protect when the maladapted, maladjusted can’t find a warm place to sleep at night in numerous American cities, but there are houses for 13,000 nuclear weapons between Russia and the U.S.? Peace is spontaneous and fleeting. War is the only constant — and it used to be that the poets were anti-war.

Now I expect to see poems about how somebody chipped their fingernail while eating a saltine 15 months ago. What the fuck?

Somewhere in the bowels of the French Revolution, a young punk named Arthur Rimbaud put poetry to bed. He wrote a manuscript that shook the planet to its core — and then he burned his copies in a fireplace after feeling himself to be humiliated as his teenage years left his body and he knew exactly what a LIE it all was.

It was Rimbaud’s Season in Hell that lit the world on fire first and foremost. Then he left for sub-Saharan Africa to sell coffee beans and muskets for the French colonizers. Why the fuck not?

And it’s just like today — the Establishment controlling everything: the mind, the solar plexus, the heart, the eyes, the gonads, the drug trade, the dealing of arms that end up in the hands of the Taliban, or NATO selling weapons to another war (sacrifice) zone so the colonizers can make MORE money by pumping their DEATH MACHINE into the brains of their pawns and playthings.

There is NOBODY SHOUTING INTO the poetry sphere about this penultimate trick. HOW COULD NOBODY BE WRITING ABOUT NUCLEAR WARFARE?

The Beats at least knew what it was all about. The bomb is the worst thing that could happen to anybody — especially a writer.

Because it means that the magic and Unglory — this self-indulgence of artistry and sophistication, so-called — has finally been hijacked BY THE ESTABLISHMENT for the purposes and deeds of their own ends. Everybody is meant to be like everybody else. And poetry suffers. Ordinary people hardly notice.

The poets tell their friends. And their parents, their sisters, and brothers, and a viral tweet becomes the NEW poetry. (Nobody reads the actual work of the poet outside of this circle. Try it sometime. Draw a circle on a piece of paper and take a good look for yourself. Give it a friend. Call it poetry. Try not to laugh.)

There’s probably never been a better time for the NUMBER of people who call themselves poets — and they flash their screens DAILY with their words that so many times just seem to fall FLAT.

Nobody notices. The American way of life has nothing to do with poetry.

And in its place come these lines of code on a computer screen with data that are outlined by servers, developers, and grinning capitalists who get more and more for their bottom line, their business model is very simple. GREED.

There are poets all over the world who haven’t the slightest touch or tinge of greed. And where are their words? What do THEY have to say?

The poets should listen more. Stop calling themselves poets.

A poet is asinine.

Until they leave all pretense

in the overstocked shelves

of an Amazon

warehouse, that’s where the poets

should

go. Who is telling THAT story?

The poet should report on modern human events with alacrity and simplistic terminology that somebody on a bus can read after a terrible day on the job. Poetry in America has nothing to do with getting ordinary people to read it.

It’s more about being seen, adored, getting accolades, appearing “SMART,” and taking home a shiny medal that unbeknownst to anybody outside their poetry circles is filled with angel dust, anthrax, and a ticking time clock that is closer to midnight than the poets are willing to admit.

Poetry is a flower in the sunlight

right before

the last and final

goodbye…