Nobody told me that yesterday was National Poetry Day. (I learned through Gerard) It’s fitting, I suppose, that I found out yesterday which poem won the competition for which I received an honorable mention. Which poem beat me, to put it plainly. There was also a little bit of a letdown, as my poem was not a national honorable mention, just local. Three schools. I’m still really happy about it, especially because I know now that my poem is much better than the winning one. The winner is not, as I suspected, about oppression or THE ELECTION, but of course it’s hard to tell just what it really is about. It did lack what two other honorable mentions had, which are sex and rape, two of the Grand Bellwethers of the current, vacuous artistic gestalt. The winner is one of those poems that makes people not like poetry. Probably so personal that only the writer can really get it, and it reads like a bunch of the author’s favorite lines from her notes stitched together in what, frankly, isn’t really a very coherent presentation. No capital letters, no periods, a few commas here and there. Line breaks just because. The post modern era likes its works to be as ambiguous and incongruous as possible, because it’s easier to point vapidly at the existence of deeper meaning when there is none on the surface (Spoiler alert: that’s a very good indication that there’s none beneath, either). I’ve never heard an attempt to legitimize the narrative transience of post modern art that sounded like anything more than an excuse for laziness. You start to want to grab people by the shoulders and shake them a bit, tell them that the artist’s very first responsibility is to be understood, because it’s the only evidence he can provide that his work means something. I will never, ever believe that blatant obscurity is a signpost on the road to the inner divinity of mankind. Full. Effing. Stop. It is unfortunately the way of things, and on my little march to the New Sincerity, I’ll be fighting the momentum of poetic esoterica until I can make enough of my own steam to stand apart from it.
I’m writing a poem today. All day and a day late for National Poetry Day. It started in a headache at Starbucks and will end, for now, at the desk in my basement when 2:50 rolls around and I have to pick up the kids. I don’t know what sort of a poem it will be. I do know that the sort of poem that wins a writing competition has lines like this:
“even the bottom looks like the top in this hamster wheel
so far behind, we’re in first
champs when everyone else will forever lose”
Ugh. Two pages worth. It’s almost reassuring to lose to a poem like that. Like losing a footrace because your blind, one-legged opponent is crossing the finish line while you’re still asking the starter if you’re at the right track.
I’ll keep mine, and keep doing mine. With lines like this:
“But if we can stand upon that ice
and bear those fissures at our feet,
the crackling threat of cold advice”
I don’t mind mentioning, honorably, that it means something.
Andy Havens 