Gerard K H Love
Appreciate your friends
Really!
However... sitting around a kitchen table drinking, smoking, talking, and laughing - you may never know you are amongst a poet. (The word is starting to bother me now that I've read it and said it so many times. It doesn't sound like a real word anymore)
How is it hypocritical to call a group useless just because you happen to be part of the group?aren't many people here being hypocritical?
I am undoubtedly not right...
I might not be wrong.
Don't many people here write? Don't many people here write poetry? Therefore, aren't many people here being hypocritical?
Yeah. 75 years ago. Before any of the outlaw poets were born....is there a school of thought or style that has a certain way poetry is to be written.
Lolita, it might appear so, but honestly, I often look in the mirror and want to gag. We're not all being hypocritical, necessarily. Some of us are just being honest. I can't stand the average poet. I am a poet. Many of my friends are poets. I like them as people, not as poets, although I might like their poems. It's a separating of the person from the role. The absolute upside down fuckedness of everything in sight forces us to become something we call a poet or artist or whatever. If the world were straight, we would all be shining angel children. I guess.
It's an ugly thing, and so ridiculous, because the larger world doesn't give a fig for poetry. It's the battle of the small pond.
Right, well, for a poetry collection there is no appeal to that kind of promotion because there is no payoff. Selling out your edition of 500 or 1000 copies isn't going to net you enough to buy a decent suitcase.The idea of having a book out from a big publisher and going on the road doing a hundred readings and signings to handfuls of people at bookshops and libraries -- what's the appeal of that?
Once it's about money, it becomes disgusting.
EDIT: Mass-production money, I meant. There's a difference between "should I buy one mansion or two?" and "should I buy bread or water?"
Lolita Ginsoski said:EDIT: Mass-production money, I meant. There's a difference between "should I buy one mansion or two?" and "should I buy bread or water?"
Hmm. Well, your EDIT didn't really make anything clear to me. It still sounds like the status quo. "one mansion or two?" is extreme wealth, but "should I buy bread or water?" sounds like poverty. All I'm saying that doing things or embracing ideas that contribute to your own poverty is shortsighted and idiotic.There is a difference between selling out and making money. I'm not saying we should all starve. In fact, I made that clear.Lolita Ginsoski said:EDIT: Mass-production money, I meant. There's a difference between "should I buy one mansion or two?" and "should I buy bread or water?"
To clarify, speaking only for myself, when I disparage poets, what I am criticising is not the creative person per se, but the self-serving, back-stabbing ego mania of the competitive poet who claws his/her way to the top of the dung hill. It's an ugly thing, and so ridiculous, because the larger world doesn't give a fig for poetry. It's the battle of the small pond. When I see it (in others, in myself), I am repulsed. My only desire is to write the best poems I can, and to get them in the hands of people who will appreciate them and hopefully draw some pleasure from them. Being recognized by the masses is monstrous and meaningless. Prizes, awards, prestigious publication have no attraction to me and seem counter productive. Being published by Bill Roberts means a hell of a lot more. That is true distinction.
Rekrab, that has to be one of the best examples of humility I have ever come across. The art will never die with people like you around.