A poem a day in April from Rutgers English PhD students and friends.

Sunday, April 3, 2011

nobody reads these things anyway

so why read anything? decision to avoid first person, avoid line breaks. poetry isn't poetry. it's playing the harp in an underground subway platform. who plays the harp underground? why do this? because t.s. eliot wrote some incandescent lines that stick to one's mind. is that reason enough? harriet davidson said in this country we don't burn our poets, we just starve them to death. not to be negative or nothin, but... i am now avoiding the first decision, but not the second. i had a three-word poem but didn't write it down, on purpose, thinking it was so good i could never forget it. also a form of rebellion against one purpose of poetry, the mot juste. i'm sick to death of being good at things. why can't we accept failure, embrace it, fuck it. why must goodness tyrannize our consciousness. when we barely pay attention to it anyway. it's merely salvageable. but failures haunt my mind, l'esprit de l'escalier haunts our imaginings. let's fuck up our lives or at least embrace their fucked-up-ness. we ain't getting tenure anyway. (are we?)

6 comments:

  1. You should have gone to this talk on failure! Especially the guy who read a piece about the tradition/anti-canon of bad writing.

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  2. I read "we ain't getting tenure anyway" to the tune of "You Ain't Going Nowhere"!

    Love that this is buried dead-center: "i had a three-word poem but didn't write it down, on purpose, thinking it was so good i could never forget it."

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  3. I liked that too!

    Let us have a hootenanny where we sing depressing-but-liberating anthems about job security to Dylan tunes.

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  4. ALSO yesterday a guy was selling one-page chapbooks with 3-word microfiction. I didn't get a chance to look at it, but I wish I had, because I want to know how you can tell a lie in less than 3 words. I think I believe you can write a poem (you will have to recite it to us someday, Tavi!)

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  5. i wish i had gone to the failure talk! ah well...

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