The Internet's Birthday
2005-10-29 @ 7:14 p.m.

Look what I found today! Cosmoetica is run by Dan Schneider, who has confirmed my belief that a lot of modern poetry is essentially crap. Bad enjambement is an especially noteworthy feature of modern poetry. (Think Sharon Olds and Carol Ann Duffy.) If you ask me, vers libre has become just another excuse for plain laziness. (Hey, if John Donne could be clever and witty within the restrictions of metre, the least you could do is try.) Frost said something about it being like trying to play tennis without a net. That said, there's something very presumptious about someone like Schneider, blasting everyone from Hardy to Yeats, from Eliot to Olds. While it's refreshing to see someone who's not afraid to rail against the supposed heavyweights of modern poetry, it does make him sound really bitter that his poetic genius isn't half as recognised as theirs. He strikes me as being absurdly arrogant. Witness this excerpt from an online article: "Turning his attention to his own poetry, Schneider proffers a copy of his Siamese Reflection, a complicated double-star sonnet. 'If 10,000 Maya Angelous banged on 10,000 typewriters for 10,000 years, they couldn't produce a poem with this greatness,' he declares. 'If my poetry isn't widely known and disseminated in 100 years, it will be a crime against literature.'" I've read it, and it is indeed clever. As for his claim to posterity, I hesitate to answer decisively in the affirmative or the negative. Is withstanding the passage of time a sufficient criterion by which a poet's intrinsic merit may be established? I think not. In any case, if he is truly as brilliant as he claims, why hasn't anyone offered to publish his work? (He has reportedly written over 10000 poems.) He'd probably tell you it's reflective of the back-patting nature of the literary establishment. Bullshit. Even if the establishment doesn't want him, some maverick out there would jump at the chance to help his cause (and get their own back at the establishment, of course). Come to think of it, Schneider reminds me of that crazy guy you sometimes meet in Kinokuniya's Takashimaya branch, the one who asks you about your reading just to tell you that it sucks, before he launches into his long spiel. He thinks Nietzche, Hemingway and Dostoyevsky are the only three people worth reading. Okay, excuse me now, because I need to go off and bemoan the fact that my poetic genius isn't being appreciated enough. Haha...