But I know deep down, the question isn't just avoiding things because they are pretentious and terrible and drive you to contemplate self-immolation. I did a lot of that this week after Glenn Frey died and all the internets and social medias were overloaded with fucking Eagles songs. Luckily I'm not quite narcissistic enough to carry any guilt about my culpability in his death given the harm I wished on him and his bandmates every time I was stuck in a medical waiting room and forced to endure "Hotel California." I get that negative thoughts can't really cause anyone else injury. Besides, most of the really bad stuff I was wishing on Don Henley.
For the most part I focused on the Alan Rickman stuff this week (excellent raconteur and shitty filmmaker Kevin Smith told a lovely story this week on one of his 700 podcasts about how Rickman cultivated and maintained a close personal friendship down the years since Rickman was in Smith's Dogma back in '99, despite the fact that the rest of Smith's films since then have been, well, shitty) and Glenn Frey, well, I erred on the side of "If you don't have anything nice to say..." I'm sure he was a great guy to his friends and family, but I knew him exactly as well as the deaf-mutes and sociopaths who love Eagles music did, so I feel just as justified in my position.
No, poetry isn't about conscious choices in either direction, pro or con. Poetry, more than prose and maybe even song, is about that moment of inspiration. It's about the bell-chorus tinking and tonging waaaay down in the belfry of your soul, swung suddenly by a gust of fecund, dewy wind from an unexpected direction, swelling into a crescendo in, at first, a screeching cacophony but settling into patterns of harmony and contrapuntals until you can just pick out the melody of something you recognize, something just... hey, fuck, is that "Peaceful Easy Feeling"? Goddamn it, Eagles. Fucking everywhere.
You can't dictate where inspiration is going to come from. Imagine my surprise this week when I had my word antennas just about blown clean off by the freeflow bebop rococo stylings of one-time part-time governor of Alaska, Mrs. Sarah Louise Palin. Her speech this week endorsing Donald Trump will go down in the annals of American rhetorical history with that guy who talked about people getting raped that time or... other stuff that was a big deal for a minute and then we forgot about.
But I just mean...
"And you quit footing the bill for these nations who are oil-rich, we’re paying for some of their squirmishes that have been going on for centuries. Where they’re fighting each other and yelling ‘Allahu akbar,’ calling jihad on each other’s heads forever and ever. Like I’ve said before, let them duke it out and let Allah sort it out..."
Homegirl went all they way to "Allahu akbar," which is already ballsy. And then closes it out with a rhyming couplet like Shakespeare or maybe Eminem guest rapping a verse on your hot single track.
The whole thing is full of solid, solid gold; a petty epic, a mastery of non-mastery of the English language. It's got sound, it's got fury, it's got the signifying of nothing... it meets all the Bardic criteria for super-greatness. It's all a great consistency of contradiction, something indispensable in the great Age of Disposability. It will be the first example of timelessness with a shelf-life.
And now, damn, I've lost my poetic nerve. That's how fickle a lover Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, can be. One minute she warms your bed, the next she quits half way through to star on a reality show on TLC. Plus, I'd be lying if I said I wasn't intimidated. I mean, to be inspired is nice, but to have to follow anything of that profound shallowness is... Well, it's a little much. Which, I won't lie, has been said about Sarah Palin before.
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