Hallelujah! Poetry, it turns out,
is not dead, I promise you. Reading this
year's nominations you realize that
it's not even on its deathbed hacking
paroxysms of spittle and bile, no,
our contemporary verse has taken
a quixotic creep toward health -- nothing a
good six months of drinking green tea with
ginseng and honey won't cure! This year we're
calling for a dose of the elemental,
yoga, meditation, brisk walks to restore
the soul. So here's my Rx, dear reader,
this year you'll find oodles of gloomy pantoums
and an imitation of Poe's "Ulalume"!
But in this new century poets are
no longer enjambing the relics of
our lives into familiar forms. Here you'll
find the palaver of our xenophobic
culture translated by Crazy Jim, and
those whacky internet postmodernists
who present us with a parade of
numbskulls and street ministries: fire eaters,
torch singers, Venetian horses galloping
in golden splendor, tattooed and gurning freaks
pounding 16-penny nails into their flesh.
Yes, the pantoum is reborn, reinvigorated,
reconstituted, recapitulated,
cleansed from the recent sins of poetry
when the hybrid jingoistic linguists just
spit any abstraction on a page, here, in
this collection, beside the regenesis
of -- dare I say it? -- the palindrome!
Yes, our old childhood friend is back on the
radar, need I refer you to these deleveled
stackcats? And for once no one in the country
wrote a flippin' sonnet, Italian or
otherwise, RIP my syllabic schemers,
and while we're reading the obits let's bid
a fond farewell to the narrative, finally,
no apostrophes, no sestinas, no
lyrical ballads, no elegies, no!
Begone! It turns out that in this new century
there's no time for mourning these exhausted
forms, no room for pettifogging meditations,
no precious villanelles, they've all been hauled off
to the ash leap of literary history,
so long!, bon voyage, they'll be bulldozed
into methane-wheezing landfills cherished
only by misbegotten seagulls picking
at the smoke-charred crematorium,
no more love, no more lust, no more blessings,
gone! Vamoose! No.This year it's all vituperative
rants and monosyllabic chants, preternatural
political rhetorics posited by
post-Christian proselytes, and Occupy
polemics hoisted on streetlights of the
new American common ground, burning flags
(there's even a typographical representation
of the American flag -- a timely
concrete poem if there ever was one! --
included in this volume), coffins of
capitalists and the neo-captains of
industry paraded through the city squares
with blank verse mantras, chest-thumping poets
demanding that someone, anyone, look not
at the stars, Brutus, but ourselves. These poems
collected here are not the byzantine beauties
you're used to ogling, no, they're declarations,
defamations, legal briefs, syllables
scattered across the page like 52 pick-up,
they're the skittering jalopies of
hillbilly wordsmiths, punks drunk in their own
neuroses, with form and content added
on like this year's new infomercial gizmos.
And so we can finally state that we've reached
the acme of human achievement, readers,
for there's no zeitgeist of meaning here, no,
readers, these are vomited phrases, the
curse of Babel, the scribblings of wanna-be saints
and self-declared prophets and beatnik
prattle-meisters, caveat emptor!, my friend,
please read this year's offerings freed from the
dead hand of the past, spurn them, rip them out
and burn them if you must, for in this new
era, this new time, our writers have resurrected
us from all the -isms, with this new volume
we're reborn with every droning delight, every
plaintive chant, every carnival barker's
promise, Step right up! Feast your eyes
on platonic ideals once cherished for
the ages now scrapped and sequestered to
the reliquary! See the double-headed
beast barking like a pathetic seal! See
Lazarus, that great begrizzled bard,
bedazzle us with his high-wire, death defying
tropes! Enter if you dare, dear reader, and beware,
for the philistine ministers of culture
are watching over your shoulder, safeguarding
the temple of poetry, starving in
their precious principles, imploring you,
beseeching you, steer clear of this linguistic
leprosy!, these expressions from ebola-
liquefactions gagging you and blinding
you with their bombastic truth! Read on,
dear reader, if you dare.
