I think this is one of those areas that you have to be really, really lucky to strike it big in. Frankly, most poetry I read, I hate. I do like rhyming poems, but there aren't too many of those anymore, thank you very much, Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass my ass. (That's fun to say. Try it.) Free verse poetry is a plague upon something that used to be a beautiful interpretation of life. Free verse is an alternate form for people who can't write. I hate free verse. They're always really vague, and try to be symbolic, but they usually just suck. Anyone can write free verse. Ask any schmoe at McDonald's to write a free verse poem. "A million candles lit / The wind traps their flame / A masked entity steals the light" See? That took about five seconds to come up with. Yeah, it sucks, but so does every other free verse poem.

And if you want a classic example of a lucky guy, take a look at E. E. Cummings. I'm sorry, I feel like a pawn when I type his name with all lowercase. His poems are a bunch of symbols! What's so deep about that? "Trans[po R Ta } ti o n." Something like that. It drives me mad that English teachers make us analyze this crap, like there's deep symbolism in it. I could type up a bunch of ascii characters with no intent in mind other than to drive people crazy, and half the English teachers in this country would find some sort of meaning in it.

Same thing rings true with modern art in general. I saw this PURE WHITE CANVAS once, called "Tundra." Gaah! What is that?! I mean, I could possibly understand if there was some kind of gradient from gray to white. Actually, no, that's still not good. But they didn't even have that! It was just a pure, white canvas! No paint! Just whiteness! Another thing I saw that boggled me was in a museum in Chicago. A pile of rocks in the middle of the room. Honest to God- rocks. Surrounded by a one of those fuzzy chiffon barriers, in case anyone dared to steal a rock or alter this masterpiece. These modern forms of art baffle me, I swear. Leonardo would be rolling in his grave.

Back