absent magazine

1)    Poetry invited you in earnest.  Poetry sent you reams of sonnets, ballads, epics, soliloquies, each lingering on every word, drawing you out of yourself and in to another one, pulling you in, tempting you to hover over every syllable, first concealing and then revealing the whole of its nakedness from angry epiphany to epiphany.  Poetry is very fuckable, and poetry wants badly to be fucked.

 

2)    Poetry is tired of being confined by the society of those who are paid to do poetry.  English professors, high-school English teachers, poetry librarians, and poets at writing workshops all do their best to define a canon of poetry.  As paid lovers of poetry, they set a few of their close friends alongside the Bard, Goethe, and two or three multinational poets who are there to prove that they’ve done some homework.  They publish in journals, and talk to middle-class, white students in the nation’s elite universities.  These individuals, these self-made doyennes, who get paid to make love to poetry, nonetheless defy in their very institutional rigor the kind of open, unlaced escape that poetry has been trying to execute since at least Mallarmé.   If they really loved poetry, they would be helping her do what she really wants to do, which is to remake society.  Instead, they grow old and fat, drinking and smoking with a few of their contemporaries, rarely traveling, and never introducing her to new people.  Poetry secretly hates them.

 

3)    Worse yet, the teachers of English take poetry out of the place where she was born, the place where she is most happy, lounging comfortably on a series of velvet cushions, making eyes at pretty goatherdesses; a creature of the drunken midnight song and the very short book.  She has been forced, against her will, into great hulking anthologies recited aloud by massive numbers of students.  Poetry has become the sexual education of the masses, describing reductionist slides of the uterus and scrotum in a bored voice - and this is what is known as “appreciation.”  She hates her job.  She longs for her old friends, opium and morphine; the familiar company of a few debauched radicals in a dark, smoke-filled basement.  She has been forced to open herself to series of sterile and noncommunicative strangers, paying with her identity to suit the masses. Poetry has been used. Poetry doesn’t want them to fuck her; she wants you, and she always has.

 

4)    Through so much abuse, poetry has been denied that very wide-ranging over life and landscape upon which she thrives. She longs to range promiscuously through the great, vast, and terrifying abyss of everyday speech, including but not limited to the ululations of girls in the middle of orgasm and the political if market-driven lyrics of American rap. Poetry wants to be free.

 

5)    Poetry might get you the girl you want in bed, so long as it’s a graduate student, especially one who’s taken poetry as a subject.  But let’s be honest here - isn’t the graduate student sleeping with you secretly because she hopes that all this - the sly exchange of favorite poets, the chance to display all of her favorite quotes, the intimacy with you, everything - is going to get her a job?  Even the person she becomes through it - edgy, radical, able to swill of reams of William Carlos Williams in one go - is a job-getting person, not a world-remaking person, not a revolutionary, not a nurturer of dreams, a force in the world. 

But didn’t you end up here because you hated job-getting mankind in general?  Couldn’t stand it?  Liar.  Cheater.  Bastard.  Son of a bitch.  And her:  Bitch. Slut.  Trashy whore.   

Poetry, the way things are now, is not going to help you get the girl of your dreams.  She’s only bringing you women who aren’t good for you, and you know it, and she knows it, and it has to do with poetry not being properly fucked. 

 

6)    In merely loving poetry, one can comfortably fantasize about meeting her family, inheriting her fortune, and settling into a little nest together, with all the ancestral portraits hanging in gilded frames upon the wall.  Pound, Keats, and Marvell are coming over for weekend pancakes and bloody marys.  Only after one is actually engaged, of course, do the family dramas start to emerge: the brewing hatreds, the flight into the church or into fascism, the suicidal and schizophrenic tendencies, the evangelical who wants only to convert you or convince you of your irredeemable doom.  Many of them are mean, and the meanest ones won’t leave you alone.  They want things of you.  They make demands.  They sneak into your bank account, they make alliances against you, they tell her you’re not good enough.  Nor are they all charming themselves.  The family tree is dark with withered roots and no-shows, with black sheep and failed writers you would rather not know.  You may find yourself one of them, sneered at by the better-groomed heirs, deprived of a chance at the family inheritance and the doors it would open.  You might regret your choice, and start to hate yourself and your decision.  It may even come between you and poetry.  It is best, my aunts used to tell me, to accept all invitations early and get to know the worst of the worst before you’re actually married.    All good reasons, sooner rather than later, to begin fucking poetry.

 

7)    You and I both know the small, dwindling, morbidly monomaniacal crowd who read contemporary poetry, most infected with a furious and Oedipal attempt to find each poet’s weakness so that they may take his place, if only for another two-year stint at Iowa.  The culture of performance breeds schools of individuals whose prime motivation is to promote themselves.  This broken world needs to find a way to employ its most sensitive subjects not in emotional masturbation but in something like an ethical pedagogy. Fuck poetry.

 

8)    Poetry seminar(ie)s are lifeless convents where lovers of poetry are isolated within a world of form, and end up making friends with other such dilettantes from the white suburbs, capable of attending such elite programs with no hope of income simply on the basis of their parents’ successes and aesthetic education.  None of them have much experience with travel, dialogue, or politics.  Who wants to read what they have to say?  Fuck poetry. 

 

9)    The monomaniacal display of ego has no more place in our culture.  It hasn’t been revolutionary since 1917, and it’s being outdated further on a daily basis by the virtual cult of collective language.  Everybody who understood language abandoned poetry three years ago to start posting surrealist manifestos on craigslist, writing eloquent personals ads, and expressing themselves through graffiti. Fuck poetry.

 

10) Language is powerful, seductive, transformative.  No one knows this better than those who have studied poetry.  The best of it is always pushing the genre to new forms.  From epic to song to novel to something more suited to the emerging castes, wants and values of our changing political season.  Those who love poetry should want to destroy it.  Learn to love fucking poetry.

 

11) Poetry, now read by a small and dwindling public of other people with literature degrees, has lost its earlier identity.  It no longer claims to direct the souls of the loyal ruling class, it no longer preaches to the bourgeoisie as a whole, or desires to embody the values of the race.  Poetry has lost its claim as a moral compass.  Fuck it.

 

12) Poetry is not bread and wine.  If you want to feed the world, start a nonprofit to bring wheat and rice to those starving million who die of famine every day.  Do not, do not, do not, if you want to love the world, write a single more poem in the place of bread and wine.  Leave poetry alone. Fuck her and get over it.

 

13) The fact is that the darkness will come, and the tiger will eat the village’s children, those who haven’t already turned into zombies as a result of being treated like machines.  Nobody knew it better than T. S. Eliot.  Poetry knows it.  If you hate the silencing of that truth to your core, quit the antidepressants today.  Spiral down with me into the hateful, grim silence which no poetry can cure, and as we write bitter, undisciplined screeds of maniacal self-hatred and powerless-reform, we will laugh with pain as we come to know what it means to fuck poetry. 

 

14) Poetry was intended to channel a transcendental beauty that would strip the subject of her present context and remove her to eternal time.  Poetry is against politics, and has no place in an era of global crisis. Stop drunk-dialing poetry and learn to deal. 

 

15) We have created an academy full of drug addicts who use poetry to numb the creeping voice at the back of their heads, the one that says that they don’t try, work, produce hard enough, saying that the world is a cruel and bitter place filled with tragedy, and telling them to change their life lest the tiger prowling in the jungle today come tonight into the village and slash the sleeping infants limb from limb.  If you don’t want to listen to that voice, you belong in one of the professions where one can most effectively drown it: stock trading, national defense, advertising perhaps.  Consume and guzzle your way to oblivion from the inherent insecurity of the present.  Poetry is an ineffective anodyne, and using poetry as a valium supplement bespeaks a weak conscience that has never taken the severity of global trauma seriously.  Forget poetry entirely.  Morphine, heroin, and cocaine are all better for what you need to do.  Gucci, Prada and self-satisfaction are even better.  If you’re just trying to salve the voices of doom, you do not belong in the academy, you make no one (not even yourself) happier by being there, and you do not deserve to live off of poetry. Fuck her and leave her; it’s better for both of you.

 

16) The big questions that are determining our survival as a race are these: famine, global warming, the privatization of public welfare, the mobilization of internal polity in elitist frameworks only crudely understandable as democracy, and the perils of corruption and promise of microfinance.  Contemporary poetry addresses none of these.  There are more important things to do.  Fuck poetry.

 

17) If you want to feed and nourish the woman in your life, get out of your relationship with poetry.  Learn to cook.  Send her perfect ginger snaps coated with toasted almonds; sear her a side of glazed duck, and fry for her a series of bright green vegetables and send them over with pots of aioli on the side, garnished with orange nasturtium blossoms.  Brew for her your own cabernet, squeezed from grapes raised in the California sun on your own five feet square of yard, tended every moment of the day, and stored in deep cellars until it was rich, shadowy, subtle, cool. Poetry might arouse your girlfriend, it might tickle her, taunt her, and even make her warm inside, but today’s poetry offers precious little in the way of wisdom meant to help her do, be, or even survive in a world that steals more of her the further she becomes from job-getting girl.   Food and wine are different.  It will be better for the woman, and better for poetry, if you trained yourself to cook every time you got the urge to write.

 

18) I can only fantasize about another kind of poetry late at night, caressing my own body, after making love to a bottle of whiskey, when I dream about the poetry I used to know, so unlike everything poetry is doing now: a poetry of political economy that would so wind and unravel the current discourse as to break inside and outside both into something wholly new.  I want, I whisper in my most intimate moment, I want someone capable of fucking poetry.