Eileen Myles: "I Hate Poetry"

Eileen Myles

I Hate Poetry

I’m wondering why we hate poetry. I don’t mean people who don’t write it. I mean people who do. I hate poetry magazines by and large. You get two copies in the mail. One to archive and the other to read for a
week and then to give away. Poems, fiction and a sad bit of art or two. It seems like poetry dies in such magazines. All alone with each other essentially. It’s the death of our art form these journals and I say it has to end here. Can’t we get our poems out some other way. Any way. In part I think the reason everyone wants to get a poem in the New Yorker is that people buy the magazine for other reasons and then they will stumble on your poem. They may or may not read it but they will see it. Maybe outside of The Nation it is the only journal I can think of that does that. Magazines and journals are dying of course like birds at superfund sites. So it’s time to give up on them first. Balloons, shirts, anything, send your poems out. And don’t let a poetry organization be put in charge of placing poems on buses. It upholds the cavalcade of nice. If poetry is nice then it is dead. The saddest job in America for instance is the poet laureate. The poet
laureate of America. That’s like being Alfred E. Neuman. When you start to work for the government next thing you know you start demanding poetry be accessible. Or else what? You’ll get detention. Being forced to be clear is right next to being good. And why we considered moral or good? Cause we’re poor. That’s really sad. Remember Nicanor Parra – poems and anti-poems. I don’t even remember those poems but their existence, the fact that he wrote poems against poetry made me glad. I hate poetry movements. It seems like now that the art world knows that movements are dead the poetry world would at least slavishly imitate the big dogs. Oh no, poetry is all ready to get in on the past and is banding together in little groups to show
its new flashy edge. Since the birth of MTV in the 80s when Madonna wore crucifix earrings like every junkie in the east village and suddenly every junior high girl in America was imitating her the idea of the avant-garde, the tiny little in crowd of art was dead. I know that artists feel that what they are up to is more profound than fashion – well some do – poets do for instance but in fact that in itself is a very old fashioned idea. There is nothing more profound than fashion. Except silence and it’s time for poetry to find a way to
speak through both at once.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2009/05/i-hate-poetry/

Check out the ROCKPILE Website and Blog featuring David Meltzer and Michael Rothenberg

Dear Big Bridge Readers, Please check out the new ROCKPILE Website & Blog at Big Bridge, www.bigbridge.org/rockpile/ ROCKPILE is a collaboration between David Meltzer — poet, musician, essayist, and more — and Michael Rothenberg of Big Bridge Press. David and Michael will journey through eight cities in the U.S. to perform poetry and prose, composed while on the road, with local musicians and artists in each city. ROCKPILE will serve to educate and preserve as well as to create a history of collaboration. It will help to reinforce the tradition of the troubadour of all generations, central to the cultural upheaval and identity politics that reawakened poets, artists, musicians, and songwriters in the mid-1960s through the 1970s. The project will end with a final multimedia performance celebration in San Francisco. The ROCKPILE Website & Blog will tell you all you need to know about the ROCKPILE project including performance dates, venues, artist bios and performance clips of some of the musicians we will be meeting and performing with in each of the cities. Once we hit the road, we will be posting travel photos, journal entries, performance videos, interviews and more, daily, on the ROCKPILE Blog, so log on and join us as we travel around the country. Write us, comment on the blog, and let us know you are with us, let us know you care! And of course, we hope to see you on the road! Best, Michael Rothenberg, David Meltzer, Terri Carrion & Ziggy. ROCKPILE (www.bigbridge.org/rockpile/) Made possible by a grant from the Creative Work Fund, a program of the Walter and Elise Haas Fund, also supported by generous grants from The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and The James Irvine Foundation, and support from the Committee on Poetry.