Tuesday 22 March 2011

Hell is other people's poetry recitals



I am quite poetophobic. It's always been just so: whatever profuse passion and affection I hold to literature in prose form, stops abruptly when things get 'poetical'. Nothing turns me off faster than a bunch of lines tossed and scrambled together to sound like they're an outcry of some profound social revolution while at the same time being experimental, erotic, original and personal... because it really, really isn not. The poems that these people recited tonight were like something bad I had written, then cut apart, glued back together and then washed in a washing machine. Bad. Baaaad. A woman was using 'Camera Obscura' so often, she managed to use its wrong form twice in one song. Of course it could be just me that's unable to see their greatness - some of these people could be downright geniuses of free style and only I would perceive them as a headache, but on the fundamental level, the one that couldn't escape fast enough, it felt like I was being beaten with a book that has random words falling out, into my eyes, burning me, cutting into my brain. The only two things I was not in pain to listen to were very very short haikus  from some old lady and the long passage of prose that Drey read from her novel. Everything else was like torture. The duo on vocals and guitar was worse than dDaniel once singing karaoke for his boyfriend's birthday (and we all still have nightmares from that, so... :p) The people there were nasty. A man spoke to me, starting with: so, did you survive an hour of literature being read? Geez, cause that's not aloof and condescending at all. Well, frankly, it felt like being bitchslapped by a book that's having an epileptic seizure. If it's radical truthfulness you're pursuing. Mr. Poet, the Almighty I-got-the-universe-by-the-shorts-and-curlies cause I say the words cunt and shit in my poems a lot. 
         Right.
         If this is what poetry is these days, then I am genuinely missing nothing, swearing my allegiance to prose. 

Drey bringing us something I can relate to

Uh, but there was this one line I did like quite plenty: "Which God do angels choose for their home and which for their holiday retreat?"
           Haha. Clever.

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