in which despite the fact that he deplores everything the author praises

I’ve been writing poetry again. it’s difficult to overcome my disgust with poetry, but really, my disgust is for the business, not the art; for the theory, not the practice. every time I pick up a book of new poetry, I read three lines and feel a deadness overcome me, a numb depression and boredom that is difficult to account for. I read contemporary poetry without pleasure. it is like eating bran on a spoon. yet, one of my favorite things to do, my definition of freedom and loveliness, is to spend a Saturday or Sunday afterrrrnoon on the porch or before the fire reading Skelton, Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare, Marvell, Marlowe or Keats; or sitting in the evening in my office after dinner reading Rimbaud, Whitman, Browning or Mayakovsky. I do this passionately, with great love. when I was young, I found traditional poetry difficult and boring, with a few exceptions. it was only as I needed to read this poetry because I wanted to know what was in it that I began to read it with the same pleasure I read Frank O’Hara or Jack Gilbert or Wallace Stevens or Pound or Eliot. this reaction to traditional rhyme and metre is both common and incomprehensible. I’m sure it has more to do with the prolix syntax of the romantics, shelley especially, but of other poets too, like Milton, and with the anti-traditional polemics of the modernists, which I had absorbed as truth, than with rhythm and rhyme per se. my response in the ear to the jingle jangle of rhyme also makes no sense when I consider that the lyrical work that really engaged my imagination and, more importantly, aroused my envy, my bloomian anxiety, my libidinal and thanatic oedipal rages, were lou reed and bob Dylan and Johnny rotten et al. the great rock’n’roll lyricists were my classics, and they scanned, they rhymed. anyway, in fact, I do read contemporary work with pleasure. Lynda Hull is a great poet, Jack Gilbert, Ruth Stone, Hayden Carruth, Frank O’Hara, Will Alexander, Maurice Manning are marvelous. I love George Oppen as much as Keats. The fact is, what I hate about contemporary poetry is how theoretical it has become, not its style, not whether it’s free or versed, or whether it is political, discursive or surreal. the other day Ron Silliman’s monster The Alphabet entered our stacks. I opened it to hate it, because silliman represents to me the triumph of theory and politics, of moralizing aesthetics over the art of poetry. but I was surprised to find much that pleased me there. he is a fine poet. what I can’t accept is the idea that I would have to dedicate the time to reading it. his poems are unconscionably long. there is enough of the punk left in me (not that I was ever a punk) that speed and brevity are paramount. unless silliman has written a poem as abundant in sheer pleasure as The Faerie Queene, he should keep it to a few pages, but that is my aesthetic dogma. the fact is, I don’t give a shit about standards. I judge poems as I judge people. there are people you love and people you don’t. unless I have to, I don’t spend time with people, or poems, I don’t love. and there just aren’t that many of them. there is another contemporary poet whose work I almost always love, and her website is in my links. that’s dorothea lasky. she’s the first writer of her generation I’ve encountered who has broken through the pomo wall to just write out of her heart without trying to bring down western patriarchal aristotelian capitalist kantian colonialist homophobic phallogocularcentrism. she’s no Flarfist, not of the SOQ. I don’t see her as a camp follower. I’m sure there are others who are bored or exhausted by the ideological struggles of boomer poets. we all inherit a battle we don’t wish to fight, or we see as over.  I can’t say she gives me hope, because hope is misplaced. I do believe there is a constant in art. it is an individual thing. but to flourish, art needs a community, just as progressive politicians only flourish when there are progressive movements to hold their feet to the fire. the poetic community is in the control of competitive hypocrites and academics. the idea of an academic avant garde is ludicrous. the definition of avant garde is: that which is unacceptable to the academy. perhaps poetry has always has been in the hands of time serving fools. but there is dorothea lasky. Maurice manning’s Lawrence Booth’s Book of Practical Visions is the most fun I’ve had reading a book of poetry EVER. no hope, just the fact. good poems and poets exist the way cock roaches, oranges and sunsets exist, because there are bugs and fruit and stars, and because there are conscious beings. a poet is a species of consciousness.

so, back to writing poetry. I guess having written two complex, long, difficult, POETIC novels in the last five years, I need a break from prose, and in this break the muse is once again on the loose, or rather, I am once again on the loose, receptive to her song. I still have no plans to publish poetry anywhere but here. but I am glad in the evening to have my old poems back, their sense no longer shuttered behind the insistent lineation of prose. we have broken out of the convent and the monastery to roam the streets with a bottle of wine, in search of a quiet, shadowed place to fuck. and I’ve even written a new poem, which I post at my own risk, to be followed by others.