The death of the novel

was proclaimed by a few pretentious college students a few decades ago. Strangely enough, they were probably right. Forget the ‘brilliant characterizations’ and all that crap. Every character in every novel not based on actual people is some aspect of the writer himself. Let’s drop the pretense of ‘objectivity’. It doesn’t exist. The only thing we know, if we indeed really even know that, is ourselves, our lives, our perceptions. Esse est percipi. The only real novels are the non-novels, reality bubbling through the filter of consciousness. Nothing really good’s been done since the Beats liberated the ink from the pen. Automatic writing is the best kind. If that’s ‘typing’, then this is word processing. Poetry is an inside joke, and as if it’s not bad enough, that the best modern art has to be explained in words to be appreciated (thank you, Tom Wolfe), then imagine the irony of poets having to hang their words from Christmas trees to be noticed. Forget dangling participles. Modern poetry closes a stanza with a dangling subject and starts the next with its almost-forgotten predicate, and loves every minute of it, almost reveling in the total and deliberate obfuscation of meaning, as if there were something quaint and entirely too old-fashioned about that.

THE MATTER WITH POETRY

Poetry is like meditation, going to great lengths to avoid direct thought. They say the secret to good poetry is to not editorialize. I say ‘fuck that’. EDITORIALIZE! Tell me what you think, tell me what you know! I don’t care what color the sky is when the sun rises in the east and I already know what every animal does the first chance they get. I want to know what humans think about every possible condition that arises in the short span of human existence. I want to know what drove you to such an extreme in the first place, that you settled for this medium in the second place. I want to know how old you were when you first contemplated suicide. I want to know how old you were when you first contemplated homicide. I want to know what you see in your mind’s eye in that thin gray area between the waking state and full sleep, that fitful profusion of images looking for dreams to rescue them from their homeless condition, before that long nod of numbness slowly sinks into a body too tired for tears, too wired and weird.

WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW

Here’s writing fit for public consumption. There’s no politics nor science, no physics nor evolution, no cuss words nor sex, no spicy pickled metaphors, no right nor wrong, no meaning, no nothing, just letters holding hands forming words forming phrases going to market, staying home, having roast beef, having none, and making the funny sounds of verbal contentment all the way home. I’m ready to celebrate the mundane, revel in the morning blush on the evening primrose, and revel in the morning blush on my wife’s face. I’m ready to publicly mourn the birth of my dog and the death of my dad, exult in the toothless smile of a bum and the toothless smile of a lad. Nobody wants cosmic poems pretending to fathom the heights of quantum physics or wallow in the death of suicidal despair. It fails to inspire and it’s just not civilized. Still photography is my role model, cool remote and serene. I want to paint with words, watercolors and oils according to the mood. I wish I could write other people’s poems. I wish I could arrange flowers elaborately, poems in the shape of chalices and goblets, valises and vases, all containing internal logic, hard-wired beauty. I want to get out of my rut and get into a groove. Alas I’m stuck in my own body, trapped in my own mind, doing the best I can one day at the time. I can’t write other people’s shit; I can only write my own.

THE BIZNIZ OF POETRY

Poetry is what happens in the cracks, the empty spaces, the margins along paper’s rim, bar chits, and bills not yet paid, void if detached. The recycled paper bin is the wellhead of new thought. Poetry is what comes out when the brain is unwinding, disengaged, coasting downhill after a long night of tossing and turning. The early morning hours are fertile ground for plowing, fallow fields for planting. Poetry is a job where you gotta’ be on call. If you can’t write in the dark, then you don’t get the job. Poetry is what happens between acts, entertainment that truly holds you between. We’re competing with jugglers and clowns; we’re not competing with scientists and philosophers. A word is worth a thousand pictures. Writing is like gene-splicing, re-shuffling the codons. The most innocent mutations can lead to entirely new species. I mine my memories to see if there’s something I forgot, cross-reference myself to find out where I stand, second-guess myself as to where I’ll likely end up. Writing is like sex; I try different positions to make it come out fast and hard, in light hot licks.

POETRY AND ALL THAT RAP

Forget story line; forget characterization. Like his critic told Jackson Pollock in the movie, “there’s only paint and surface”, words and paper, time, a medium for light and sound. A medium it is, certainly nothing rare nor well done. Nobody’s writing the great American novel anymore, just pulp fiction for ultimate adaptation to screenplay. Most poetry sucks, too, reverted to the flower arrangements in fragile crocks that the Beats smashed to bits fifty years ago to no future avail. When the smoke clears, poetry’s firmly back in the control of the academic pencil pushers and their precious little artifices and the delightful breaking of grammatical rules for dramatic effect. Someone who’d never dangle a participle leaves a subject noun suspended in mid-air at the end of a stanza waiting for the verb beginning the next stanza to rescue it and its lack of importance from certain oblivion, the flying trapeze of literature. This proves nothing except that the author went to poetry class and learned the insider’s language. I get all giggly just thinking about it. Of course ‘slam’ poetry tries to undo all that artsy-fartsy crap by the pure will of ego unleashed on a noisy stage, releasing obscenities on a suspecting public in dire need of sensibilities left to offend. Its similarities and simultaneous emergence with rap music is more than coincidental. Henry Miller and William Burroughs were the right men for the jobs of their times, but it remains to be seen who’s right for the new millennium, an age of interdependence possibly beyond the grasp of heroes.