Saturday, January 24, 2009

The inaugural poem issue is still fueling many postings all over the web. Most or all of the heat and noise is generated by poets of all stripes, both the published on- a- pin -head variety and the can’t- get -laid- in- a - whorehouse variety. They seem to have taken possession of the entire issue of The Poem. It is the center of their universe. Their one chance to get noticed, albeit by proxy, has been hijacked by the controversy over The Poem’s worthiness. To dismiss it as trivial, modest, inept, inapt, unmoving, or otherwise ineffectual, is to mark them with the same stain, as if The Poem was a community effort and not the work and performance of one individual.
This is a phenomenon of Poet Ghettoization. They all live in a crumbling tenement off in a marginalized and forgotten corner of a city which has on its mind everything but Poetry. It’s their own fault. They got there by choice, after struggling across potholed streets, through gang infested turf. They were dying to live there, and now they wonder why the rest of us out here in suburbia aren’t driving up their property values.
Please insert many smily face emoticons where appropriate.

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