Saturday 6 September 2014

Herds of Rebels

Jason Guriel offers some tips to avoid being a crappy poet. Here's one I liked:
Don't try too hard to be innovative; you'll only sound dated. Certainly don't be arrogant enough to regard yourself as 'avant-garde'; you're not, and anyway, you wouldn't wear a mass-produced tee that says, 'rebel,' would you?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

blah blah. How can these mildly radicalized reader's digest poets believe in the worth of their opinions? Anemic mimicry rules the day... or is this irony? A challenge? These generalist market-place "art" statements that fail to grapple with the parameters of a vibrant dissenting avant-garde, the reduction of poetic causality to entertaining an unnamed intelligent "her," condemning cliche (yet expressing it) and extolling precision (procedural narrowing? One-dimensional administrative gab?), while thinly echoing Ginsberg's oft repeated Howl opener, - he should have taken his own prescription and held back. There is little difference between a mass produced t-shirt, a mass produced collared shirt, and the critical wallop of Guriel's feint advice. Soft academe, darlings.