PostPoems Be Artistic. Be Creative. Be Inspired!

I have recently been informed that highly allusive poetry---like, say, T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land; poetry that majors on allusions, quotations, references and snippets from other literatures (whether cited or uncited)---cannot be said to be entirely written by the poet, whoever he or she happens to be.  This, of course, dismisses---and frees us from the burdening challenges of---highly allusive poets:  Vergil, Shakespeare, Old John Milton, Deformed Alexander Pope, Old Possum, and, of course, Uncle Ez---aka Ezra Pound.  Thus freed from the challenges in reading they impose upon us, we are free to avoid admitting our ignorance in failing to pursue, or understand, all those allusions, quotations, references and snippets (whether cited or uncited); with the additional payoff that we can pretend to write in a vacuum, without acknowledgement of the literary canon that preceded us, so that our writings need not conform to a standard of excellence except our own, which would defeat and deflate those writings, and ours egos, right out of the gate.  Who wants to bother understanding the historical context of, say, Richard III when we can more easily complain about current events (and be accorded sympathy for our unhappinesses)?  Who wants to stagger through the verbal play, implying intimacy, between Romeo And Juliet when we can more dramatically and emphatically express our own fears that our inherent awkwardness and clumsiness, coupled to an innate disregard for the emotions of others, will keep us from ever getting laid (and, oh the sympathy we can acquire from such effusions).

  That said, I wish to complain---and hope with great fervor that you will join in my complaint---against the American poet, Wallace Stevens, whose poem, "Reply To Papinni," cannot be said (by the standards of which I was informed, previously) to have entirely written this poem . . . since it alludes to, and even appropriates, a character, Celestin VI, a fictitious Pope, created not by Stevens but by the Italian journalist Giovanni Papinni, in his book, Lettere Agli Uomini Del Papa Celestino VI.  In his book, Papinnin composed several letters from his fabricated pontiff, Celestin VI, which were critical of the society and culture of that time.  I, personally, have not read Papinni's book:  having slogged my way, over four years of undergrad study, through poems that were just rife and ripe with allusions, quotations, references and snippets (whether cited or uncited), I certainly have no desire to put myself through those ponderous paces to read some foreign journalist's fictitious, deliberately manufactured bishop of Rome, writing highbrow statements that could just as easily say, with better simplicity, I feel rotten today.  Isn't that, really, what it's all about---how any poet, you, me, the grand piano in the drawing room, or the grandfather clock in the foyer, feels rotten today.  Instead of writing over ten thousand lines about two naked people in a garden who take the bad advice of a snake in the grass and, misled by that bad advice, use it to challenge the sovereign commands of God---couldn't John Milton have just used common English words to say, "I feel rotten today, and I blame it on two naked people in a garden five thousand years ago."  Or Dante---thirty-three thousand lines just so his girl friend can rebuke him for not getting around to writing about her sooner?  Why not just say, "Well, Beatrice is pissed off, and I sure do feel rotten about it today."  And then Pop Stevens:  instead of just saying, "Aw, shucks, Giovanni Papinni has made me feel rotten today," writes this poem (well, by the standards of which I was recently informed, he did not entirelt write it) which addresses Papinni, and through Papinnin, Celestin VI, who does not really exist except as a figment of Papinni's imagination; so why say, to an imaginative figment, "I feel rotten today."

   You see, the secret of immediacy---which produces emoted sympathy (and isn't that what all we writers are after)---is saying, "I feel rotten," rather than, say, illustrating that feeling by cloaking it in the burning of Troy, or the rape of a lock, or even failing to find the card of the hanged man.  Shucks, the hanged man must feel rotten enough of his own; but, then again, can he really express, on my behalf, how rotten I feel today?

    By gosh and by gum, let's chuck it all:   all those highbrow, snotty and edgy-cated allusions, quotations, references and snippets from other literatures (whether cited or uncited), and all the other forms, formats, frames, and frenzies that inhibit us; and let us get busy filling our pages with real literary productions that succeed in proclaiming, revealing, describing, and confessing that which is the most central core and purpose of all poetic endeavor, indeed, of all literary endeavor:  I feel rotten today.