The other night, I participated in a really dynamic reading at KGB Bar in Manhattan with authors Rose Schaap, Elena Alexander, and Jiwon Li. Those women were my performative betters and I was all the better for it. Our conversation after the event enthused over the dynamic diversity of our work and how too many readings cluster the same customary, cliche-riding monotony of groupthink, recitations of stillborn similarities and safe, self-satisfied pseudo-verse and prose.
That endless literary train of creeping conformity and quietude is enough to make one's enlarged heart self-eviscerate on impact with its rococo cattle catcher. However, there are antidotes and anti-agents willing to explode the symmetries, simplicities, complacencies of the tracks that allow these trains of bad thought and bad art to glide in their stride. One of the mightiest is DISPATCHES FROM THE POETRY WARS (http://dispatchespoetrywars.com/)...POLEMICAL, AT TIMES (NECESSARILY) NASTY, AND FANTASTICALLY FUNNY. Founders and facilitators Michael Boughn and Kent Johnson and a slew of contributors have been viciously vigilant in putting a blowtorch to the crotch-conscience of content conventions, the intellectual perversities of too many conservative universities, most MFA Programs, and too many institutions to number...until they are buck-shotted and book-ended by the fine final words of the dedicated and mischievous folks at DFPW. And then you can count them, one after the other, as the reputations of those institutions lie in stagnant state within a wider rotten estate, their epitaphs duly written pre-deceased, all across their surfaces...
Hail, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars! Stick another fork, another is DONE!
