l∅ckedinab∅x: Can Poetry Matter?

30 July 2003

Can Poetry Matter?

I found this very inciteful essay by Dana Gioia, whoever he is, some literary critic it would seem. It's america-centric, but what he says rings true for the British poetry scene too, at least, as far as I'm concerned. I first got involved with the Cardiff poetry scene a couple of years ago, after joining a now defunct writers group called 'vicious circle'. Here, I befriended Matt Dalby and Sacha Karaulov. I learnt some important lessons at that group, one of which being that most so-called poets write shite, sentimental shite at that, or cheap wordsworth knockoffs, or rhymey crap (nothing wrong with rhyming in poetry, I hasten to add, but if done badly it makes you cringe). Since then I have had a healthy contempt for anyone calling themselves a poet, until proven otherwise (for example, by reading their work and discovering that they really are a poet).

*** Anecdote ***

Last year I attended a poetry event put on by The Red Poets Society, a group of marxist "poets" (they have no official site, the link is to one of the members personal homepage) to launch the latest issue of their magazine - what followed was a diluge of self-congratulatory "poetry" that filled me up with loathing, bored me to tears, and inspired me to pen a piece right on the spot in protest, which i performed open mic at the end, read in a slow bored drawl. This one instance did much to reinforce my belief that anybody calling themselves a poet is an inbred (not actually inbred, read the Dana Gioia article and you'll know what I mean) wanker lacking in talent. You can find the piece in question below.

Dana Gioia Online - Can Poetry Matter?

+ today is tuesday +

I got up
ate cocopops
watched the moomins.
I had an epithany
it wasn't very good.

I went into town.

Met God on a street corner
we went to a pub to talk.
"I'm so misunderstood!"
I smile and nod.
I gave him my last £5 and went to the park.

The marxists were out, trying to indoctrinate anonymous masses
I sat under a tree and counted blades of grass.

then I went home
then I ate
then I slept.

(c) Adam Cheshire, 2002

[qu∅tes]

"one helped oneself out of solitude reluctantly by laying hold of some little odd or end, some sound, some sight." Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse

[on cinematography] "After you have done a picture you forget everything you have ever known, so that you become a child again, or an infant or a void into which the new picture creates a whole new evolvement... So that you do not have to keep doing the same thing all over again. In other words you take what yourself back to ground zero. Of course you cannot unlearn what your brain knowns. But I mean it emotionally. I mean you just become scared again, as if you do not know anything... I never felt on top of it. I neverfelt that I knew so much that I could sit back with a cup of coffee and it would all turn out wonderful." - Conrad Hall

[on cinematography] "When the budget is minimal you are forced to look at light as you find it, and to make it look good." - Haskell Wexler

"Rock 'n' roll is like an attitude, it's not a musical form of a strict sort. It's a way of doing things, of approaching things. Like anything can be rock 'n' roll." - Lester Bangs

"The capitalist mind perceives the world purely in terms of material resources to be used for its benefit, to increase productivity and profit without thought of long-term consequences." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head

"In shamanic cultures, synchronicities are recognised as signs that you are on the right path." - Daniel Pinchbec, Breaking Open the Head (excerpt), Book of Lies

"...reality is up for grabs, so learn the codes through which the narrative is crafted and participate in its unfolding." - Douglas Rushkoff

"Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atomized at a time when the Japanese were suing desperately for peace. The American leaders were acting with almost inconceivable treachery by denying that they had received requests for peace…The bombs were exploded on congested cities filled with civilians. There was not even the slightest military justification, because the military outcome of the war had been decided months earlier." - Dave Dellinger

"We're living in a new Beat time, in my view. And it's very difficult for us to hang on." - Tilda Swinton

"Pursue the small utopias: nature, music, friendship, intimate love." -The Fugs

"We have reconstructed the Tower of Babel, and it is a television antenna: a thousand voices producing a daily parody of democracy, in which everyone's opinion is afforded equal weight regardless of substance or merit." - Ted Koppel

"There are alot of things you have to sacrfice. It all depends on how deep you want to get into whatever your gig is. Whatever you're there for. So like the deeper you get into it the more sacrifices you have to do, maybe even on your personality or your outward this and that. I just dedicate my life to this whole art. You have to forget about what people say. If it's art or anything else, whatever you really, really dig doing, you have to forget about what people say about you sometimes. Forget about this or that-when you're supposed to die or when you're supposed to be living. You have to forget about all these things. You have to go on and be crazy. Craziness is like heaven. Once you reach that point of where you don't give a damn about what everybody else is saying you're going towards heaven. The more you get into it, they're goin' to say "Damn, that cat's really flipped out. Oh, he's gone now". But if you're producin' and creatin', you know, you're getting closer to your own heaven. That's what man's tryin' to get to, anyway." - James Marshall Hendrix

"With its totalizing claim, the system created the conditions for this horrible retaliation. The immanent mania of globalization generates madness, just as an unstable society produces delinquents and psychopaths. In truth, these are only symptoms of the sickness." - Jean Baudrillard

"If poetry is what you can't translate, as Robert Frost once suggested, then art is what you cannot define. Nevertheless, it's fun to try." - james monaco, 'how to read a film'

"This spectacle of banality is todays true pornography..." - Jean Baudrillard

"...today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political groups. We are bombarded with pseudorealities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms." - Philip K. Dick

"There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose ideas, shining in his head, frighted people and for whom delirium is the only solution to the strangulation that life has prepared for him." - Antonin Artaud

"The way to create art is to burn and destroy ordinary concepts and to substitute them with new truths that run down from the top of the head and out from the heart." - Charles Bukowski

"Tea heads are a sociable lot. Too sociable for my liking." - William S. Burroughs

l∅ckedinab∅x

30 July 2003

Can Poetry Matter?

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