The Wasteland

The Wasteland by T.S. Eliot

DIONYSUS:
"I want a genuine poet,
For some are not, and those that are, are bad."
from Frogs by Aristophanes

     Violence in the defense of poetry is no vice.
     About three years ago I physically attacked a "poet". I was at Bar Noir with Vienna, Todd the Wad, and the Wad's wife, Mary, on what happened to be Open Mike Night. [Attention club owners: DO NOT allow me to enter your establishments on Open Mike Night. This is akin to allowing the Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan into your club on "African-Americans Talk About The Best Ways To Kill Whitey Night". Something bad is bound to happen. Consider yourselves warned.] I drank my way though four mediocre poets and by the time number five mounted the stage I was ready to taste blood. Most of what happened, thankfully, remains a blur to me but the story has boiled down to this: I leapt on the guy screaming "Defend your poetry with your life." Oddly, I didn't get thrown out and my wife never filed for divorce.
     I mention this story only as an example of how seriously I take poetry. I think that I take it so seriously because it something I can't do very well and could never do very well no matter how much I practiced. It's like whistling. Whenever I see a really good whistler I had then a buck or two and ask them to whistle the theme to The Andy Griffith Show (The whistling equivalent of The Wasteland). Whenever I see a good poet…well, that's the problem. I haven't seen a good poet in quite a while. And this problem, I think, stems from something poetry and whistling have in common. Anyone can call themselves a whistler, but not everyone can whistle the theme to The Andy Griffith Show just as anyone can call themselves a poet but not everyone can write a decent poem. What went wrong?

     From Homer to the Def Poetry Jam - the de-evolution of the poem.
     Poems, like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey or the Bhagava Gita, used to be long affairs full of adventure. They were difficult to memorize, but they remained popular for centuries. Linguists now believe that the popularity of these poems was, in a large part, due to the fact that "They didn't suck."
     Shakespeare didn't suck, either. Ol' Will understood that, in-between running each other through with swords, people like to recite sixteen line poems about the emptiness of life. So the next time some patrouli oil-stinking white chick with dreadlocks raises her hand in English class, pop her one in the tit before she can bad-mouth The Bard. The last thing the world needs is another two-hour speech about "dead white men."
     Dead yellow men, of course, invented the Haiku and I'd just like to take a minute to give this form of poetry mad props by sharing three of my Haiku's with you:

Beaming down to Glork
I'm the guy in the red shirt
Dammit, Jim, he's dead

He spent a lifetime
in the service of the Queen.
He worked for Rex Reed.

OK. Like I said,
I'm just not a good poet.
We can move on now

     Poets were the Rock Stars of the Eighteenth Century. Blacksmiths were the Rock Stars of the Nineteenth Century. Rock Stars were the Rock Stars of the Twentieth Century, and - if Bush gets elected to a second term - Blacksmiths will get a second change at being Rock Stars in the Twenty-first Century. You heard it here first.
     Since I've already written extensively on the subjects of the Transcendentalists, limericks, and Native-American oral histories while I was at Harvard, I'll move on. Anyone interested in my thoughts on these areas may consult my doctoral thesis: "Pull my finger, c__t."
     Let us now jump (right over T.S. Eliot and The Wasteland, unfortunately) to the Beats. Over the years, the Beats have gained an undeserved reputation as bad poets. While there were a few bad Beat poets (I'm against burning books, but I would make an exception for Howl) their real crime was

that they were the first poets that the public openly made fun of. In the immortal words of Bullwinkel J. Moose "A Beatnik is not a neatnik." Soon most men gave up poetry altogether for fear of being associated with Maynard G. Krebs. Poetry slithered from underground coffeehouse into bedrooms of teenage girls.
Teenage girls held poetry captive in their bedrooms (Which, despite how it sounds at first, was a very bad thing for poetry) from approximately 1962 until 1983. During this period, teenage girls managed to change poetry's central theme of "What does it all mean?" to "Why is everyone so phony?" The majority of these heinous poems found their way into the pages of Sixteen Magazine. Would somebody out there please take the initiative to collect these poems into an anthology? Why? Because, although there's nothing sadder than bad poetry, there's nothing funnier, either. Academics (and, oddly, more than a few stevedores) didn't find any of this poetry funny. They just found it sad. Many thought that this period would be remembered as poetry's darkest hour. They were wrong. Things were about to get much worse thanks to a teenage girl named Henry Rollins
Sometime in the early eighties, Henry Rollins founded what my friend, Chuck, would later dub the "Pain/Brain/Insane School of Poetry." Here's a typical example:

There's a PAIN
In my BRAIN
And it's driving me INSANE

    See how that works? Realizing that the term "poetry" was a hindrance in the getting laid department, Mr. Rollins and his ilk renamed their efforts as "Spoken Word." And, thus, a new plague was visited upon the Earth.
     As the eighties drug on, coffee houses again began to spring up like something-or-another waking and popping up from beneath something else… like snow (Look, if you've read this far, you can supply own analogy.). These coffee houses soon began to fill with angst ridden suburban teens clad in Dead Kennedys t-shirts who were eager to step to mike in order to inform the world that "Corporate AmeriKKKa is so phony, man." Rock on Preston W. Cabot-Lodge IV. Our story might've ended here if it weren't for the popularity of a poem (set to music) released in 1988 titled "Fuck the Police".
     Before the advent of NWA's magnum opus, most young white people were under the impression that that all African-Americans had been adopted by white millionaires known only as "Mr. D." and that, apart from having their friend, Dudley, ass-pirated by the guy who played Mr. Carlson on WKRP, they were doing just fine. Now white kids had a whole new crop of angry individuals to invite to their poetry "slams". You see, for every three or four rednecks who think that all African-Americans are Willie Horton; there are one or two white liberals who think that all African-Americans are Langston Hughes. Both sides are, of course, wrong. All African-Americans are, in fact, Jimmy "J.J." Walker. Colin Powell constantly interrupts cabinet meetings with his screams of "DY-N0-MITE". Where the fuck was I?
     Oh, yeah honkies and rappers. So, white kids invited rappers to their invite to their poetry slams and the rappers, en mass, said "No thanks, whitey." C'mon, why should Ice-T travel to Connecticut just to read "The Hunted Child" to a bunch of college kids who are going to respond with golf claps, when he can rap it to a stadium full of scantily clad women who'll show there appreciation in ways that make BET's "Uncut" look like a CBN pledge-drive. Hey, folks don't hate the playa - hate the playa's penis.
     Denied rappers to legitimize their pointless gatherings, white poets turned to any African-Americans willing to read at a Slam. That's how we all learned about "Possitivity in the community". This is also why the DEF Poetry Jam sucks Afro centric ass.
     None of this really matters, though, because on August 3, 1999 poetry (which had been on life-support since the Fifties) died. It was on that day that Jewel released "A Night Without Armor: Poems". And just like that, poetry was dead. An entire generation would grow up thinking that Jewel is a great poet. They'll never read Homer, or Poe, or Emerson. They'll never begin a book of poetry with lines in Latin and Attic Greek, the way T.S. Eliot did.
    But Jewel didn't walk away from this crime without a scratch. MTV, the beast that had spawned her, suddenly turned and showed its fangs in the form of a very pissed off Kurt Loder

LODER: There's a line you have,'There are nightmares on the sidewalks/there are jokes on TV/ there are people selling thoughtlessness with such casualty.' Casualty doesn't mean that, does it? Casualty's like a guy gets his arm blown off. I mean isn't that...
JEWEL: That's a type of casualty.
LODER: What?
JEWEL: It's a type of casualty that ...
LODER: No, really. I thought you were trying to say casualness.
JEWEL: No, casualty.
LODER: Oh, OK. All right. Are you a tech person? Do you take computers on the road, do you log on, e-mail?
JEWEL: No, I'm a bit archaic. I mean, I still write everything by hand. It's quite archaic.
LODER: Wow.
JEWEL: It is wow. I'm dyslexic as heck. I mean, I just can't type well.
LODER: Really? That'd be a problem for a writer.
JEWEL: It is a bit of problem. I mean, putting the book together. Everything was done by hand. I had to recopy it legibly to get it...
LODER: That explains casualty probably.

Epilogue:
It was while researching this piece that I went to http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry and saw the following: