Rimbaud asked, “Why not toys and incense already?” Play and the sacred are the 69 of poetry, its yin and yang, but to really play, one must be willing to get dirty, and nothing is messier than the World Wide Waste, a vast mud pit for poets to frolic in.

Before the internet, writers interested in weird, amateurish or specialized lingos had to scrounge for them in used book stores and porn shops. There was no Google to barf verbiage onto your lap. I used to spend hundreds on magazines with names like Over Fifty and Fabulous, KO, Soldiers of Fortune and Flying Saucer Digest. Bad, bumbling English is always a happenin’ planet, stretching your horizon. In the visual arts, one artist in particular, Jim Shaw, alerted us all to the bizarre, goofy world of amateur creativity. He collected thrift store paintings and arranged them in installations. His 1991 show at Metro Pictures, NYC, was declared by critic Jerry Saltz as “one of the most important shows of the decade [...] it brimmed with dementedly entertaining art [and] unlocked the doors to scores of dead, forgotten, or otherwise devalued painting genres. It was a gold mine of overlooked pictorial information, a mother lode of untapped graphic imagination and pictorial possibility.”
The arrival of the WEB brought a flood of the suckiest English ever, an infinity of cute or frightful pornography, SPAM, flarf, YouTube, Ron Silliman’s blog, UBUWEB, babelfish, MySpace, Ebay and plenty of cheap or free graphic softwares. Within this overly-seasoned, mostly foul chowder, it’s hard to locate the bobbing head of a romping cyberpoet. That’s why we need poetry webzines that will only showcase works created for and with the internet, such as the piece below by Angela Genusa. For the lashed sick months or so, she been using her bog as a lavatory to spearmint with bad, badder and utterly atrocious English. At her worsted, she can be opined to really bloweth, frankly, but at her bestest, she suckest even wurst. Is it, like, artistic? How the focus do I know? But I no what I lika:
Or this piece by Italian poet, Gherardo Bortolotti:

03.18.08 PERMALINK | ONE COMMENT

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Audio, Video. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.