Forget (Scrub)

Nov 11, 2010 09:20

There is a certain sort of modern poem that I just can't stand.

It's like they grab a nature symbol, a pop culture reference, and an abstraction, and butcher them in the plainest language they possibly can. All sort of straining toward one another like girders rusting inward in the rain. But nothing touches, nothing matches, nothing signifies anything. And it's not really sound and fury so much as a dull roar, a little trickle, the wet dribbling patter of an idea about rain tortured down the kitchen tap, tonight at eleven.

Death has no mouth and I must not scream. Go to sleep, o.
But Oprah's on! How can I rest 'til I have run, run, run
After brilliant kites waving goodbye? No money down.
Low monthly payments.
Might be more relevant if we roped in something about diets
Chicks read poetry
and hate themselves
and that's what we call a win-win, Bob.

I tried? I can't even.

I see a lot of "kitchen references to loneliness and ennui" in the few slim journals I'm able to find at the magazine counter ever. It's like they're all writing love letters to each other in some kind of unbearable mouldering code.

I wanted so badly to be swept up in Scar Night, the jacket for which reads like everything I need recently, but.

The characters mean nothing, and the city isn't well-described, and there's--nothing to attach to. It's literally a city without foundations, and the book feels the same way. I sat and read it halfway through, waiting for some hint of a sign that it would live up to everyone on the flyleaves with their knees openmouthed, gasping through slick wet lips and still trying to swallow right.

No. Never saw it. Strained through hundreds of pages, plural. Never got a glimpse.

I felt a slight something for the angel that can't fly, but nothing else. We don't know these people, and we never get to know them. And then there's the part where the book...just doesn't...make much sense.

While I'm up here: Ulcis, ulcer, religion is cancer--we get it already. You can stop impressing us with your atheism now.

Look. This is very basic, Alan. I want characters I can empathize with, a setting I can see in my mind's eye, and a plot I can solve. Okay?

Even Mercedes Lackey can do that.

omf books!!11

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