And THIS, my not-so-gentle readers, is supposed to be the very best of the best that we got to offer. Like I’ve been saying for the past 15 years or so — and believe me, as a poet and an absolute WORSHIPPER and SHAMELESS FANGIRL of guys like WS Merwin, Bobby Lowell, Ted Hughes, and TS Eliot…and broads like Anne Sexton, Sivvy Plath, Elizabeth Bishop, and Maggie Atwood — it breaks my heart into a million tiny fucking pieces to even utter it aloud:

Poetry, as an actual art form, IS DEAD. I’m talking DEADER THAN MY HUSBAND’S DICK WHILST LOOKING AT NUDE PHOTOS OF MISS SARAH JESSICA PARKER AND HER FRIGID EQUINE VISAGE AND JIMMY CHOO HORSESHOES. I’m talking NOT ALIVE here, folks.

What is passing as poetry today is 99% SWILL — absolute self-indulgent, navel-gazing, meathookian rubbish. The problem — and I’ve been bellowing this for years at anyone who would listen — is that no one is actually READING poetry…they are only WRITING poetry. Ask the editors of all the most influential poetry and lit journals in this country and they will verify what I am telling you. Readership and subscriptions are fucking VAPOR, baby — NADA. Ah! But the increase in the numbers of poetry submissions they receive every year is actually mindboggling. Tens of thousands of no-talent meathooks with computers…pouring out their poetic smegma for all the world to see — all the while having ABSOLUTELY NO MOTHERFUCKING IDEA WHAT POETRY EVEN IS. Yes, ladies and gentlemen — GARBAGE IN…GARBAGE OUT. You heard it here first:

THE POETRY MEATHOOKS AIN’T WEARIN’ ANY CLOTHES.

From the review:

“What I’d like to focus on is the aesthetic that seems strewn all over this particular anthology: poetry as a mechanical art. Walter Benjamin talked about the lost aura of the work of art in an age of mechanical reproduction. What we have here is poetry that is so seeped in the mechanics of mechanical reproduction that it seems to be looking beyond its status as a work of art, and reaching toward something of populist gnosis. It is poetry as facsimile, poetry as self-imitation, poetry as garbage in, garbage out.”