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what's wrong with American poetry right now?

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what's wrong with American poetry right now?

wrong = song

Sarah Elaine Smith
May 16, 2023
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what's wrong with American poetry right now?

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What’s wrong with American poetry right now is nobody’s having fun.

That’s all.

I should probably pin the corners of this idea down to the ground with quotations from a liberal (but not in that way!) range of sources which will, in ghostly fashion, outline the drone cloud of my thoughts for you, and make you think that I’m a cool person, someone who listens to the right amount of pop music and knows the theorists who are dry as a brick, in the right way.

The range of signals, the number of things about us which can be made into signals, the codification of these signals as 1/0 entities in an algorithm, has made an enforceable politics which will, if you follow it to the burnt-out bellybutton where it started, make you want to fucking kill yourself.

There’s no point in having a rhetorical rond de jamb about whether to kill yourself.

Attention pays whatever you put it on—that’s why there’s no point.

The overwhelming sentiment of poetry for the last 10 or so years has been: “How dare the rose bloom while suffering exists?”

And the answer is: I don’t know, but it does.


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