(via the blog of one David Thompson)
Who doesn’t like themselves some good poetry? Well, as it turns out if you don’t like *all* poetry, you’re committing an act of violence:
Mister Guzman, who has apparently deleted his twitter account after accusing people who don’t like his poetry of having “toxic masculinity,” wrote this… “poem:”
My heart was a dystopian
berry budding in water tiger
lilies claiming
hocus-pocus wonder. I was broken
vanity, vixen vase, victorious tête-
à-tête — the Scrabble game nobody won
because the tiles aspired speculums.
Ummm…
I know that art is subjective. But… am I alone in thinking that this seems less like something an artist slaved over and more like something that was produced via a simple app that selects words out of the dictionary at random? In any case, the “poem” continues:
Twerking in church,
I outperformed the candles
diarized in the simpleminded annexation. Wussup,
Blastoise
with the veiniest homebound
pika-pika aim?
Wussup, Sims
Chumbawamba Family Portrait Simulation?
St. Sunny of the Sissies
beheld the bukkake throng
…
Ummm. What. WHAT.
And that’s not all of the “poem,” it goes on for a while more. But you get the idea.
The dictionary definition of “art” leads off with:
the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance.
That doesn’t really seem to apply to the random word salad posted above.
Now, I’ve never heard of this feller before, and I bet you haven’t either. He’s hardly the poet laureate of the United States, so why pick on him? Well, not because I have any interest in the man; after I hit “post,” unless there are comments responding to this I’ll probably put the whole thing out of my mind and never think of him, his terrible opinions or terrible art ever again. But there will always be this tiny nattering thought in the back of my noggin reminding me that randomized gobbledygook such as this will not only find a market, but a market of prattling nincompoops with outsized cultural impacts, ready to declare anyone who doesn’t like this cheap dreck to be not only the lowest form of ill-bred philistine but also very likely a fascist.
Best case scenario: it turns out that Mr. Guzman doesn’t actually exist. He is, in fact, a hoax, fabricated by some jokesters wishing to prove that the modern poetry scene has so debased its own standards that it’ll glom onto anything, no matter how talent-free, so long as it displays sufficient wokeness. Sadly, I don’t think that’s the case here.
