There once was a man from Nantucket...
Ah, fuck it. I'm no poet. Neither are 99 percent of those who think they are.
Long gone are the days of true tortured souls who knew how to spin a verse. Poetry is dead, my friends, but its brain-dead zombie corpse still walks the Earth.
The formula used to be simple: If you were a little crazy, a lotta suicidal, and a few shots of moonshine brought out your best iambic pentameter, you were destined to be a poet. See the incomprehensible ramblings of Edgar Allen Poe, T.S. Elliot and Sylvia Plath.
Unfortunately, our generation got the ass-end of poetry.
The formula got warped somewhere along the way, probably by Beatnik poets in the '60s who substituted weed for creativity.
Now, if you're an overly sensitive loner with a goatee, and a few cappuccinos bring out your best drivel about love/politics/sex/The Man, you are destined to be a shitty, pompous poet.
Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little…
Damn, I suck.
OK, so perhaps my description of whining goatee male poets is a bit generalized. After all, it leaves out the whining feminist female poets who [most of the time] don't have goatees at all.
While we're stereotyping, let's not forget the other token characters that mistake themselves for poets.
There's the jilted lover, who rambles incessantly about chasms of love and bleeding black hearts. There's the oppressed minority who bitches about the privileged class while wearing a Prada jacket and oh-so-hip-hugger jeans.
And let's not forget the middle-aged crisis man who spouts out similes about his restrictive 9-to-5 job and screaming children.
Out of this batch, there might actually be someone who has something to say — something innovative or from the heart — something that conveys a message they otherwise couldn't express if not through poetry.
But the bulk of these so-called slam poets, who take the stage at corporate coffee houses and spit out the first [probably pre-rehearsed] thing they think of, simply like to hear their own voice.
One, two, buckle your shoe. Three, four…
Boooring. I really do need a lesson from these poets.
I've been to several slam poetry sessions around the Valley [see "Reason's Rhyme," Page 6], but I fail to see the ingenuity in it. The poems are supposed to be improvised; yet they seem contrived. They're supposed to be inspirational, but most are just plain annoying.
They're supposed to be original, and yet, if I hear a poet compare his heroin addiction to a sordid love affair one more time, I might just take up the addiction myself to dull the pain of bad poetry.
Maybe it's my fault. Maybe I'm just so deficient artistically that a poem's message flies right past me. Maybe I need to be more accepting of the saliva-spitting, passionate poets who flail their arms and scream about their problems.
Maybe my attraction to starving artists [translation: lazy and poor] has embittered me against true creativity. [You can only hear that your eyes look like moonlit pools of love so many times before you start to get suspicious — and nauseous.]
Or maybe Plato was right when he said, "Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand."
Or not. It seems like there are no real poets left in the world. Then again, they're probably not lurking at the local Starbucks.
Reach the editor at ashlea.deahl@asu.edu.
