The art form I do more than any other is poetry. When I write poetry, my first rule is to make my poems poemy. My poems invariably rhyme and I try to make them outwardly pretentious and vintage. As elitist as they initially sound, I consider it the opposite of elitist. When people want a poetry experience, I want to give them the experience of poetry. Ezra Pound can write for the literati; I write for rickshaw pullers. As said in an earlier article, the poor don’t resent the rich but would prefer a Disney princess and fairy-tale to a globe-trotting yuppie. They’d rather have The Sleeping Beauty than Gossip Girl. Making pretty poems that rhyme and are sprinkled with Elizabethan English is similiar to telling a folktale with royalty in it. While it, superficially, seems classist, it is the tradition of folktales and is the opposite of classist while more modern-reading poetry is, in earnest, more classist and truly pretentious. Within that framework, I produce better poetry than I would otherwise. Honestly, the poetry sounds vastly better when I make them poemy.
The most important thing to do when writing a poem is to know what you’re trying to say. I don’t write much in the way of love poetry since I have never had a girlfriend and the current era is rather uncharitable regarding such things outside of the context of a relationship but it is an easy example and I have written a little albeit not to anyone in particular, just to hypothetical and fictional people. One poem, which is in the document attached to this website, “Love Letter to a Sydney Girl” was based on the Judgment of Paris in the Illiad. Since Troy is on The Dardanelles, it is in rouhgly in the same location of another very famous batttle: the Gallipoli Campaign. In thinking about how I could compare the two, it dawned on me that “Judgement of Paris” sounded like “Treaty of Verseilles”. What if the girl could be a vision of peace in the horror of the war? Which would poetically juxtapose itself against the Illiad in which Hellen of Troy was more a trophy to be killed over than an angel who brought peace.
That he was engaged to a woman across the planet but after the long journey home they would build an idllyic and happy life together and the metaphor can be reversed since that is very much what people like Woodrow Wilson were trying to do with their international liberalist ideas like the Fourteen Points. While it isn’t explicitly, stated, it is implied the ANZAC narrating the poem is engaged to the woman he is writing to since they will kiss in the context of a treaty to build a beautiful world. He could be a delusional stalker who thinks he is fated to marry her but as the final authority on my own canon I can say that is not true and they are engaged. He survives the battle and they have a happy and lifelong marriage. That part is not in the poem, at all, but I just made it canon. The best part of authoring fiction is being the demiurge of my canon. I am not the god of my canon since while my religion might be the correct religion in the real world; Christianity is, without question, the one true religion in my canonical universes.
The point however, is that the poem was made into a good poem because the woman was made into a moral object. The poem is an anti-war poem and the woman represents a utopian teleology of peace and love. With its Great War setting, is it Wilson’s Fourteen Points? Can it be extended to represent all dreams of moral paradise or progress from the perspective of someone in a moral cesspit? That is what, of course, makes a poem poemy more than anything else: subtext. To compare it to a non-poemy and therefore bad poem such as Ezra Pound’s famous “In A Station of the Metro”, whatever subtext one may derive, there is, ultimately, nothing there more than inarticulate emotion with no real ultimate meaning once one has dug through the proximate ones. My aim is to narrate truth and the human condition for the ultimate purpose of bettering humanity.
Ezra literally participated in a genocide from which we can deduce he knew nothing of the human condition and should therefore not be considered a poet. Poets are expert scientists of the human condition and truth, Ezra Pound was a writer of poetry but he was not a poet. His rehabilitation shows one of the reasons I thoroughly despise most of the avant-garde and large portions of the artistic left. What they see as poetry need not be moral or truthful in the ultimate. I don’t know what they’re looking for but it is not truth or moral beauty. What I believe they’re looking for is a dopamine rush from the psychological phenomenon known as reactance which they lack the metacognition to realize. So many of them orgasm at being called iconoclasts and they need to be told that if you try too hard to be cool, you end up being lame.
I honestly don’t know what the consensus of the 20th century literati was trying to say over the course of that century but it ended up amounting to a conspiracy theorist hobo with untreated schizoid and paranoid shizophrenia preaching incoherrently from their chair. The most famous thing the Avant Garde did in the final year of that century was to blend live goldfish in a Danish “Aht” museuem. All of which meant the political left’s moral canon was inconsistent. It is hard to oppose factory farming of animals when cruelty to them is being justified by one of your polemicists. True poetry would describe how a man whose childhood likely had them gaze upon a creature such as a goldfish as an amazing and wonderous creature all for that magic to die, poisoned by a postmodernist ideology which led them to fail to see the light in the beatty eyes of an innocent fish at which moment the soul dies and beast rises. That describes the human condition, it describes Marco Evarsetti, it describes the descent into fascism, and that is how one writes a poem.
The Autistic Resistance 