Some time ago I was at Barnes & Noble with my sister, and I had a look at the poetry section. I was dismayed that, after all these years, the modernist poets s

Some time ago I was at Barnes & Noble with my sister, and I had a look at the poetry section. I was dismayed that, after all these years, the modernist poets still have a stranglehold on the Muses, with their sad, clammy, modernist hands. As if e.e. cummings were a poet merely because his typewriter lacked a shift key, or T.S. Eliot merely because he mistook the carriage return for punctuation. A wasteland indeed! Surely thine eternal soul shall forever suffer hellfire for thy r.h. Sin. Poetry, poetry… “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” half the time if it’s not got random line breaks or indentation then people don’t consider it poetry but if it does then that is enough and as for the other half—or so very nearly half, like a pie whose pieces have all been eaten but whose dish yet contains stale morsels broken off by the very act of dividing the pie, remnants too small to be considered worthy of taking by any prospective eater now dried by the chill Winter atmosphere and the pale rays of a Spring Sun not yet arrived—any prose bearing any recognizable characteristic of poetry whatsoever, any prose perceived to be elevated on high—how high exactly I cannot say, perhaps as high as the throne of a king or the perch of a songbird or the very heavens hereon—and clothed in raiment of purplish hue—how purple I cannot say, perhaps as purple as the robe of a king or the fletch of a songbird or the very heavens at dawn—but it is this high and purply prose that this half deems poetry. It reeks of, I realize, elitistry and snobbistry, but it is, in reality, good ol’-fashioned honestry. We get such pretension, ostentation shoved down our thirsty throats, dawn to dusk by marketing and adverts, and PR’s brazen boasts, that oft I find it stifling, the stench of stagnant shit and piss; and so to whiff a fresher air, I call it what it is. Every god and reader knows there’s nothing wrong with prose, yet a sentence broken in the midst is poetic only from a distance; and have it ne’er a music, metre, rhyme: your “poem” isn’t worth my time. — “Greaves of Ass”