Contemporary BlahBlah

I feel like my previous post, the one about Allen Ginsberg, the one making claim that America sorely needs a polemic revolutionary in poetry to cut the shit party of acquiescence, is in direct reaction to contemporary poets, critics, and publishers (or the trifecta of Joyelle McSweeney!) who sum up the condition of contemporary poetry as one that:

“rejects the future in favour of an inflorating and decaying omnipresence, festive and overblown as a funeral garland, flimsy and odiforous, generating excess without the orderliness of generations. It rejects genre. It rejects “a” language. Rejects form for formlessness. It doesn’t exist in one state, but is always making corrupt copies of itself. “Too many books are being written, too many books are being published by ‘inconsequential’ presses, there’s no way to know what to read anymore, people are publishing too young, it’s immature, it’s unmemorable, the Internet is run amok with bad writing and half formed opinions, there’s no way to get a comprehensive picture”. Exactly. You just have to wade through the plague ground of the present, give up and lie down in it, as the floodwaters rise from the reversed drains, sewage-riven, bearing tissue and garbage, the present tense resembles you in all its spumey and spectacolor 3-D.” (see this post)

Come on Joyelle, it’s sad to be sad!

The coming of age of the mid-20 post X generation is upon us and hopefully we’ll have more to say about our condition than witty description or ironic journalism, perhaps we’ll invent a way to get out of it or get rid of it!

The previous post and this one is not necessarily to defecate all over Action Books, Fence Books, Robert Hass, and contemporary poets, it is more of an homage to what they are doing, in fact those poets described in the last post and this one are writers whose work I worship (Linh Dinh, Minnis, Hass, McSweeney, etc.) …

I’m just raising awareness that everyone is saying something negative, and that something is going to give or we’re all going to break (drown in the plague of shit rather than wade in it). We just need someone to part the sea of it, or at least a new voice like a large capacity septic tank, one to suck the shit away.

Love,

JL