When I first started to write this manifesto, I asked my friend to help me, an informed decision based entirely on his being Russian and a drug addict, which made him seem like the best man for the job. A great many Russian drug addicts have gone on to write marvelous manifestos, although unfortunately I can name none of them right now. To this request my friend responded, “Long Live the Victory of People’s War!” and then “oi can probably do that, but it’ll be me mostly shouting class-based analysis over my fone or /whatever! hit me up.” I’m afraid he never really understood that this was an artistic manifesto, a miscomprehension only compounded by the fact that I never had the time to tell him in the first place. However, everything is okay because I only asked him to help because I thought it would be a funny question to ask a Russian drug user on a Saturday night and because I never expected a serious answer anyway. I hope he isn’t still waiting on my call.
By this time you’re probably wondering why I haven’t actually gotten to what my manifesto is. This is neither your mistake nor mine; it is completely due to the fault of the five-paragraph essay with the thesis as the last statement of the first paragraph and the first statement in the last paragraph (look! Chiasmus! I hope) we learned when we were first taught to write essays. But this work will not follow that lauded structure! This is my first rebellion. Since I can’t think of my second rebellion at this moment we might as well launch into it.
Writing, by posing as academic, deep, and esoteric has been able to largely avoid joining the twenty-first century. I don't blame it much; this century is a scary place full of verbal butcherings and strange abbreviations. Really, what kind of world is it anymore when there are white people holding up these signs:
“Congress Shred Your Taxing Scholiast policies not my Constitutional Freedoms!”
“English is our language
No excetions
Learn it”
It might be useful at this point to clarify what a scholiast is. There are two definitions; 1., one who writes marginal notes and comments and 2., socialist, what a Tea Party-ite (or affectionately called “Teabagger” online) meant to write before bad spelling and an overzealous spellcheck program took over (During this whole story I am most impressed with the spellcheck program. In terms of attempting to elucidate and instruct our generation in new vocabulary words, you certainly get an A for effort). But what about “excetions?” Where was spellcheck there? In the comments section of this photostream of white people holding up badly misspelled signs, Je11lybean writes: “That’s why they are ‘conservatives.’ They are just conserving their letters.” Okay, so maybe these people are lingual conservatives, but the rest of the offenses in this day and age cannot be explained away with a mere flick of the conservative wrist.
But despite these offenses, English should join the rest of the modern world. Poetry, specifically, is in an execrable state. I once wrote that "Bathos in twentieth-century lyric poetry is a lack of sincerity; it is cleverness over genuineness; it is true emotion sacrificed for convention; it is, abstractly, a feeling of being cheated and lied to by the poet." I sincerely believed this in my heart when I wrote it, and I believe it now. Unfortunately, Keston Sutherland, my poetry professor, was not convinced, and since he got a BA and a PhD at Cambridge, I know I should agree with him (He also gave me a firm B in his class). But I hold a certain amount of love for my words, and all words in general, and thus I have to speak out.
I think there are two roots to this problem. One, the false poet and writer does not want to do work, and two, the false poet and writer does not want to be understood. It’s like that famous anecdotal quote, “He’s more afraid of being understood than misunderstood.” Mayakovsky wrote that too many people believe that divine inspiration will alight upon their heads like a dove or ostrich, and the poet will claim to want to write but only wet their fingers and rifle through a few pages of poetry (I’ll be the first to admit that many times I am a “thinker-idealist” writer, instead of an “acting-doer,” which basically means I think about the idea of writing something more than actually doing it, most of the time). These two things create a great many literary problems, and I will show you what I mean :
LUST FOR LIFE
by Michael Robbins
The elephants ate each other then they dreamed
of eating elephants till their captors came
to feed them. Then they died. My meth lab
tends to explode. I move to a new one
like a hermit crab. I give the gift of gab.
The truth gets me hard. Song selection
is key. The idiot Swedes do a number on me.
They invent refrigeration and sleep in shifts.
I’m tired of being compared to Britney Spears.
She’s so pretty. I’m covered in petroglyphs.
That sorcerer bewitched my penis!
I’m speed and space, an Aztec princess.
The truth makes me hurl, the truth’s a mistake.
John Milton jumps out of my birthday cake.
The psyched Mohican oils the beaver.
Fruit Stripe gum soon loses flavor.
Everything’s flammable. Everything’s flash.
Postmen like doctors and doctors like cash.
Okay, so at first glance this seems like a pretty good poem. It got published in The New Yorker, didn’t it? But I hate it; I think it is the very model of bathos and everything that’s wrong with poetry today. I acknowledge that maybe, I might have missed the entire point of the poem. Maybe, even after this BA in English, I still don’t know how to read poetry properly. Maybe, but it is possible that the real truth is more frightening: That the people at The New Yorker don’t know how to find good poetry, or – even more frightening – they don’t care if they give it to us.
But how manufactured can poetry be these days? Mandatory film on art allusion? Check. Gives you a clear “-ism” to identify? Check. Pop reference for cultural reference? Check. Literary reference cleverly hidden in the structure of a children’s rhyme? Check. Faux enlightening insight? But of course.
And to what end? I don’t understand anything any more than when I first started reading this poem, and I didn’t even get to appreciate it as art for art’s sake because, goddamnit, I didn’t appreciate it at all in the first place. And it really gave me no way to appreciate it in any other way than in the surface level. Which may be all good and well for the editors and readers of The New Yorker, but for the rest of the world, it is no good and continues to sink writing further and further away from reality.
Keston may have disagreed with me, but I adored him as a professor. He gave me what I consider the benchmark for what passes for good poetry. He said, a bad poem gives you a list of boxes of literary devices, and it goes through ticking off all the boxes. A good poem is when all the ticks fall outside the boxes and you have no boxes to tick.
So this is my claim, my clarion call. Down with bad poetry! Writing, especially poetry, is an exercise in brutal honesty and a discovery of all the nasty things you would rather not have known about yourself. And while bad poetry may get you in The New Yorker, rest assured in your next life you will burn in a literary hell along with Dan Brown and Nicholas Sparks . If you don’t have the stomach for that, there are a million other ways to make your living, and a lot of them good ones (right now I’m really into Japanese flower arranging). On the topic of his son, the famous Chinese writer Lu Xun said, “On no account let him become a good-for-nothing writer or artist.” On other people’s sons, he said, “When the child grows up, if he shows no talent, find him an ordinary job to earn a living. On no account should he pretend to be a writer or an artist if he is not up to it.”
If you’ve been particularly astute, you will remember that I referenced the time and date earlier. Saturday night. You may ask, “Why is this manifesto being written on Saturday night? Or, more probably, what kind of loser is writing a manifesto on Saturday night? Simply put, it is the only time that I had to write. I feel like being a student today is much harder and time-consuming than how my parents and their generation remember their studenthood. Although, I believe this situation could be greatly remedied if only we could have online grocery shopping and delivery like decent and civilized people. For God’s sake, the English do it, and these are a people that, according to survey, almost half of them have injured themselves while eating a cookie. As if this weren’t enough, the survey goes on to report that for three percent this occurred when they “poked themselves in the eye” with the biscuit and for seven percent when they were bitten by “a pet or other wild animal” who wanted the cookie. The point is, we had the right idea in 1776 and that we should have grocery-delivery.
The other point of this is that, it’s late. And I have to tutor early tomorrow. We’re working on writing an essay about conflicting forces in a character and how they contribute to the theme of Crime and Punishment. My tutor kid’s teacher does not believe that Svridigailov could be a good man, and thus we have a lot of work to do in order to convince her otherwise. So I leave you to your bed, and me to mine, and hope you are successful on your own journey of avoiding bathos. And also to remember, never take anything a writer says for truth solely on his or her word alone.
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