Why does bad high school poetry get published?
I came across an ad in our Las Vegas newspaper for a poetry reading of a Pulitzer-prize nominated she-poet who will remain nameless throughout this article(…so as to retain some good karma for myself). I looked forward to the event for two days! Scheduled my whole Monday around it! Invited friends [who all declined]. Parked in a risky “staff” parking lot. Wandered for twenty minutes in the dark around a college campus I’d never seen.
I admit it felt remarkably exhilarating to find myself beneath those unflattering, orange campus lights; same as my alma mater ten years ago. I peered into classrooms and down hallways wherever possible. I blended in so well with the students on the quad that it was even hard for me to believe ten years has gone by since my academic days.
Finally I found the right room (in the anthropology museum?). I opened the doors and met a familiar stench of unshowered men. I’m talking moldy socks, body crust, dandruff…. how that rotten odor’s omnipresence bridged high school and college years. I told myself these kids don’t get to do laundry every day, and that it costs $12.00 in quarters to do a load. I remember what it was like. Never was I so lazy to stink up a whole room, but hey, I know where they are coming from.
The funk was oppressive. I sucked it up (not literally) for the sake of fine art and the pleasant thought of pretending I was 21 again.
The poet herself was mid-poem. I hustled to a seat and tried to focus.
The first 25 minutes I honestly gave this woman my open mind. But I just couldn’t accept her. The work reminded me of the Goth kids I went to high school with whose poems always included the staples: death, blood, bloody, my soul, your soul and my personal favorite “ flesh“. Ew! I’d like to go on record and dare any of you to present me with a poem that is both excellent and includes the word flesh. I do not believe it exists. As soon as the word Flesh is pumped into a poem, it automatically obliterates it to smithereens. I’m just saying….
I’m still trying to figure out what a “bi-right” is? Based on the numerous contexts in which it was used, I gather it to be a rig or industrial construct of some sort? That said, this woman lacked stage presence altogether. She stumbled through her own poems and, at one point, announced she “hadn’t read that poem in 12 years”. Gee, thanks for preparing for your public poetry reading, madam.
Her appearance was unkempt and disheveled; which is normally forgivable if you are a true academian too enthralled by your craft to care about these things. The more she talked, her slop began to grossed me out. She punctuated unnecessary curse words during deliberately awkward and embarrassing breaks of iambic pentameter. Her poetry lacked wit, newness, innovation, correlation and frankly I found it just plain gross. And, I don’t give a damn about Laurel trees.
Sigh.
I feel guilty for poet-bashing on this crisp winter’s night.
The evening wasn’t a total loss. I extracted a pebble of inspiration out of an otherwise flat-lined attempt at creative thought. Here is my baby poem born from the marriage of disappointment and hope.
My onyx city….a place to pray
Under your gluten eyes
In their graduated hostility
For endings
The walls hum around you
And around my yoga glow
So many endings….sappy, happy, nerve….endings
I try to translate the language of fire….convert its size, shape, flame into English.
This makes nervous.
I’m bored. Let’s eat.
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In other news, I visited two potential teaching sites today. They seem promising; in a sense that I might teach there, not in a get-rich way. I also practiced my “yoga-speak” on a dear friend and fellow instructor. Concluded that I need to practice teaching bicycle abs and instructing a safe triangle pose. Teaching yoga is a hard job. You think you reach the ledge of know but its more like know-has-no-ledge. Reminds me of high school geometry:
| Line | Connects two points via the shortest path and continues indefinitely (forever) in both directions |
http://www.helpingwithmath.com/by_subject/geometry/geo_terms_definitions.htm
