Let me share a story with you.
You’re referring me to modernist poets, and I think the story I am about to relate to you may define what I’m trying to say.
In the UK, there is something called the Turner Prize. It is awarded for modern art. The Daily Mail ran a Not-the-Turner prize one year. Best art I’ve seen in years. It was a response to the bullshit art that is modern art and all things modernist. It was particularly a response to the woman who won the Turner Prize that year — a woman who presented an unmade bed with a panty on it. Not a picture — the actual bed and the actual panty. A journalist asked her what the difference was between his bed with a pair of panties on and her supposed art.
Her reply?
“But I’m an artist. You are not.”
I took a look at Gary Snyder’s ‘poetry.’ I find it stupid and unreadable, and I don’t care what he won. I would simply question the sanity and intelligence of the people who awarded him that prize. I’m curious why you thought of him when you read what I had to say. To contradict what I said?
There are modernist writers like James Joyce. There is modernism in architecture and design. I have a strong aversion to modernism. I find it ugly, stark, lacking in beauty, and, in my opinion, it requires no talent, and it is generally the work of depressed people.
It’s also a matter of the emperor with no clothes. Nobody wants to say anything for fear that they are thought ignorant and stupid. I have no such fear. I don’t care if people think I’m ignorant and stupid.
“I don’t know if I believe in modernist literature any more. This writing once meant more to me than any other kind, but now I am wary of it. I see it as a vision of humanity primarily built around meaninglessness, cerebralism, incompleteness, and illness. It is a literature about futile quests and a search for identity that is only meagerly fulfilled. It is often referred to as “dark.” For much of my life these values felt innate to me, and now they are alien.”
That said, thank you for your kind words about my own work. I wasn’t part of the Summer of Love. I was very much at a church boarding school in a small town in South Africa. Television was also banned in South Africa, so I didn’t really know anything about the Summer of Love.
I would agree with you that there is something amazing about hearing a poet read their own work. It is quite an amazing experience. Their reading of it often gives it a life of its own. :)
