This is what real poetry looks like
Yes, I'm fucked off!
I am fucked off and angry. Why? It’s not just because of the state of this fucking dystopian horrorshow world which people just shut their brains off of, it’s because of the fucking dumbing down of literature and creativity. Sometimes I think the worst thing that ever happened to the world of literature is the ability of anyone to post shit and call it literature and pay other people to promote it and get promoted by scamming fucking ‘lit mags’ to make them think they have some mod-fucking-cum of talent.
It’s called dumbing down, obviously.
I once went to a literary festival, in Dartington (that’s in England, for all my non-English subscribers) and that ruinator of poetry ‘Andrew Motion’ was delivering some interminably boring ‘I sound like Prince fucking Charles’ lecture about poetry and he read out his own ‘what passes for fucking poetry’ bullshit, and then there was this Q&A session after so I thrust up my hand and asked him a provocative question which was something like ‘what do you think is the difference between poetry and prose’ and he just came out with some waffling bullshit and what struck me the most was that he didn’t - seriously - even get the pointed nature of my question. Which was essentially - what you do, Motion, isn’t fucking poetry. It’s prose arranged in lines on a page to make it look like poetry.
And more than that, it’s self-indulgent fucking bullshit.
This was around the turn of the twenty-first century. So if you want to pinpoint the moment when poetry died, well, that’s it.
So then, as an act of fucking resistance, I am going to present you with some of the stuff I wrote just after that turn of the century. This is real fucking poetry.
Am I angry? What the fuck do you think? I’m a fucking genius surrounded by fucking Epsilon-semi-fucking-morons. Of course I’m fucking angry!
I wonder what the fucking GIG has to say about that.
Marianas
I am frantic.
You not love me still,
Sweetly in spring when the birds sing
Bad songs, down burning trees
And you misrepresent me, stinging, scandalous
And free, like I wish
I was seventeen
Or us in a deferring dream,
Diving without air into her
Desperate and deterring
Other lovers in your last life
Before me in some paradise parade,
Diving like some peaceful bird with hints
And hues and swept ocean shadows
And scars.
Who knows I may
Fought another life
In a war to end my wars
And nowadays,
When I sleep on my own I
Bear no shame;
I keep and am maimed
And she,
Distils. She has me tamed.
Torpor
I cannot distance my self from what I see,
I am not like you, Sedna,
Though I ought to be.
It is a cloud upon everything
I ever do or feel, charged electric depth these perihelion feelings
Riven in the snow and passing over me
In the orbital manoeuvre.
There is a soul overboard, sometimes
Me in a distinguished lifetime, different
And distant to the way my confidence works today.
I am being
Eaten alive by fresh lacerations,
The wars you fight are mine too,
And my days are harder and coming up fast.
Give me the order to sink
And I will crush my sounding self,
Burst the vessels of my shunted thoughts
And shun the surface forever, torpedo my pain and scuttle away
To the underworld again, in my autumn years,
Careening and divining reminder of the world I
Never wanted to wear.
Now that’s what real fucking poetry looks like. If you don’t believe me, read it again. Real poetry always needs to be read more than once.
I think I will do some more of that in the harder times to come.
Links supplied as and when…
Yeah, I suppose I feel a lily bit better. Maybe.
Update [24-10-21] - I got another TiF medallion for these poems! I am delighted to share it with you. And I am definitely minded to post some more poetry because I do have a lot more where these come from. Actually, I just remembered, there are two others from this collection (it’s called Kundalini) which I posted for the Pomes & Words feature. Just follow that link.
Aha! Actually, I decided to start posting the whole effing collection! It starts at this link there.
Also, you’ll be equally pleased to hear that I’m feeling a lot better now.
Brilliant!
You invoked Sedna, so of course it's a delighted 'yes, give me more' from me.