Saturday, December 31, 2005

From the Seattle Stranger

from "We Regret Poetry" by Charles Mudede and James Latteier

"Something has to be done about this. Something final has to be said. We regret the contemporary poetry spewing out of this city, this region, this nation. It goes without saying, in all ages, there are too many poetasters—poetic disasters, people who believe that the whole substance of the form is a sort of confessional or a way to commemorate some moment of epiphany. However, no age can match this one in the amount of phony profundities that are strewn about us everywhere: in the broken stem of a flower, a cherished hurt, an act of forgiveness. Fathers, as we have noted before, come in for a lot of this." Full article here.

Sounds like somebody needs a hug.

4 comments:

Steven D. Schroeder said...

The notion that there's lots of crap poetry: true, but also self-evident.

The notion that there's proportionally more crap poetry now than there used to be: nonsense.

The notion that poets and poems ought not to be full of themselves: the best idea here, but one that might work better coming from writers who seem less full of their own selves.

The whole article: whiny.

Radish King said...

Mudede is a stuck up ass. He taught my son at Richard Hugo House back in the old days when they still taught interesting classes for kids there, and after that would never even say hello or acknowledge P's existence.

Mudede has become a small newspaper STAR. Please. It hasn't made him a better writer. He disses kids he's taught, and whines about an art he doesn't practice. He needs to shut the fuck up and stick to Police Beat.

Unknown said...

You tell'em Rebecca!!

Happy New Year's everyone!

The Sublibrarian said...

Their argument also destroys itself.

You can't praise the poets they do at the beginning and then reduce 1960-2000 to Hall, Wilbur, and an anemic avant-garde: all of the poets at the beginning were writing in that period and all of them are representative of strong strains that continue to expand and proliferate.

Looks (from a little googling) that Mr. Lateier has been hanging out with the Seattle Research Institute folks, so he's pissing in the middle of his own party. Hence the lame-ass disclaimer at the beginning, no doubt.

All of this is making me feel like digging out Pope and re-reading "Peri Bathous."