Why Poetry is Going to Hell in a Handbasket

by Joseph U. Slaymi

The title of my essay is clearly meant to warn the faint-hearted reader that the author is not one to shy away from controversy. Those of you who prefer the breathy exhalations of today's namby-pamby, effeminate commentators should read no further; you'll get no such sissified New Age natterings from me.

Poetry is going to Hell in a handbasket because, quite simply, the world is going to Hell in a handbasket. This may come as a surprise to those paragons of political correctness who are to be found mincing down the hallways of that cloud-cuckoo-land, the liberal University; but it is an irrefutable fact, however much the emasculated mama's boys and tight-lipped feminists may cluck to the contrary. Human civilization as we know it is crumbling to dust all around us, evolution reversing its course, the human form rapidly reverting to that of the Rhesus monkey, language devolving into a series of clicks and grunts, and social interaction being reduced to the level of a primitive mating dance. All of this deterioration is clearly traceable to a single root cause: the ascendancy of the lyric in contemporary verse.

Now, if you are a mouth-breathing dunderhead, eager to swallow every half-baked theory promoted by the black-turtleneck-and-beret set, you disagree with me. The lyric, you protest in a weak falsetto, is convenient. But it is precisely that convenience that makes the lyric the literacy-killing juggernaut that it is. No wonder the lily-livered Francophiles who control our small presses are so eager to promote it. Can't have an educated populace, can we? Nothing would be more devastating to their sales of the emotional excretus that passes for poetry these days.

The main problem with the lyric is that it's short, and this has convinced the weak-minded among us to take an interest in poetry. No longer content to leave the writing to experts like Willie Shakespeare, Willie Blake, Bobby Burns, Tommy Hardy and me, today's so-called readers are more apt to be drawn to the modern claptrap they've been bullied into admiring by the Diversity Police: Langston Hughes, for example, or Elizabeth Bishop.

Worse still, the shortness of the lyric fosters a sense of accessibility and egalitarianism that's as lethal to real literacy as Adrienne Rich to the libido. Suddenly, everybody's a poet, from Suzie Housewife to Wendy the Waitress. Grandmothers whose time would be better spent crocheting doilies instead spend their spare time sweating over nicey-nicey little verses that don't repeat the word "whore" over and over. Every starry-eyed Girl Scout with a pad and pencil thinks she's Lord Byron. And in true contemporary fashion, they all want to scribble about such touchy-feely subjects as emotions and interpersonal relationships. At this rate, the poetry world will soon be overrun with poems about real, everyday life. Epic poems that tackle the manly themes will be banned, henpecked out of existence by literary Nurse Ratchets, and stacks of books by such venerable authors as Geoff Chaucer and Johnny Donne burned in the public square.

The other problem with the lyric is that ever since the Antichrist, Ezra Pound, managed to hoodwink the literary powers-that-be, modern poetasters have seemed to take a perverse pleasure in writing a lot of inane twaddle that doesn't really mean anything. Take, for example, this load of pretentious blather by Wallace Stevens:

The Snow Man
by Wallace Stevens

One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

What exactly does this poem say? Why, exactly what its speaker beholds: Nothing! It's nothing but a lot of high-sounding free-verse palaver, an unmusical meterless mass of pseudo-philosophical poppycock. Now, compare this insurance clerk's gaseous emanations with the following poem, which contains what I consider to be all the essential elements of true craft: Rhyme, Meter, and Rage.

Whores, Whores, and More Whores
by Joseph U. Slaymi

When fools attempt to versify,
My nostrils are assaulted by
The stench of suppurating sores
Upon the bums of toothless whores.

Whores who sell their souls for money,
Whores whose eyes are red and runny,
Whores who grab at every zipper,
Whores attacked by Jack the Ripper.

Froggy whores who say oui oui
To every passing man they see,
Whores who do not write like me,
Yet dare to call it Poetry.

Of course, I'm not claiming that my humble offering above is worthy of, say, the T. S. Eliot Prize or the Richard Wilbur Award. But the difference between my poem and that odious drivel by Stevens is that mine shows evidence of a literary sensibility. Note the perfect clarity of message, the adroit use of metaphor, the historical allusion to Jack the Ripper, and the general evidence of serious craftsmanship throughout.

Needless to say, the bourgeois matrons and priggish schoolgirls who are sapping the poetry world of its manliness will do their best to have such daring work tut-tutted out of existence. After all, we mustn't offend their precious ladies-tea-party sensibilities, must we? But true poetry, if it is to survive in the real world, must have the cahones to tackle the tough subjects.