A Poet Died...that you never heard of...but was famous enough to get an obit

A poet died.

When was the last time those words meant anything to you?

You open up the newspaper and it's a headline about a poet who died.

Allen Ginsberg might be the last time it happened.

Before that, Carl Sandburg. Robert Frost.

That long ago.

Gee, the lines above COULD be a poem, especially now that poetry, along with modern art, has degenerated to the point where it can't even be defined. Thanks to splotches on a canvas, and random shapes, it's not easy to tell what a famous artist created from what an elephant did with brushes tied to its trunk. Or a sheet of linoleum samples at Home Depot. Likewise, any random words on a page can be a poem. OR, any half-drunk diary entry that accidentally misses a few verbs and includes obscure references.

Today, I happened to glance at the obit list, and saw an unfamiliar name with a familiar term after it: POET.

Really? A poet died? And I never heard of him? OK, what did he do and let me read a sample.

First, what did he do. He hid in Academia, that's what he did. That's what they all do. You can't be a "poet" and drive a cab, or own a watch repair shop, or run a daycare center. You HAVE to be a PROFESSOR. That way poetry magazines are much more likely to publish you. You're a "prestige" writer, and you'll be showing the magazine to literary types, and making sure the school library subscribes.

Here's the blah and the blah.

You can google a poet's name, and you'll find something like this on one of the poetry "foundation" websites. Some site that gets a grant in order to compile its futile biographies and lists of impressive credentials. Yes, the only modern poet anyone seems to care about is Maya Angelou, but Academia must be served. There are lots of little literary magazines and college journals that must fill up the pages with obscure scribblings, all of it with that "I'm so much more intellectual than you are" tone, along with "By Gad, what I recall is PROFOUND."

At one time, poems sometimes appeared in mainstream magazines. Now, only The New Yorker seems obligated, and as always, the poems in The New Yorker are almost universally dismissed as dried up drivel.

These days, the Internet is supposed to help with publicity, so most poets will allow a few of their precious works of genius to be sampled. Then, BUY THE CHAPBOOK, would it kill you? The poet has a box full in the attic, another box full in the trunk of the car...

Did that make ANY sense to you? BE HONEST. Of course it didn't. That's why you're reading ME, and never heard of HIM.

Dreary self-involved people at M.I.T. or other colleges might congratulate each other for writing that thing, but even MORE would reject it. The average poetry professor would say, "No, ditch the entire first half. It's self-indulgent. Start with Manhattan. But even then, it's no big deal."

Want to try another one? This one was the sole example of the poet's work on one poetry website. Apparently the poet either wanted to keep all the rest of his gems under copyright control, or figured this masterpiece would be the lone one needed to represent him:

You wouldn't find a thousand ones better than that in high school and college yearbooks around the country? That's sadly the point: that poetry is just a racket like anything else. It's a game people play. Have some ethnic hook, some back story, or be part of Academia, and you're in. You're part of the Emperors and Empresses who have no clothes and cloak themselves in their pretentious words. Most any Poetry 101 teacher would say, "What did you do? You had a passable, boring little visual on a time-honored way of fishing, and then you tossed in some guess-my-allusion crap about Thelonious and Bruno? What the hell for? Do we have time to worry about you and your little puzzle?

I remember the rather bitter Judson Jerome grumbling in his "Writer's Digest" column all the time about "proetry," the habit of people to simply write prose in a poetic form. He also was annoyed when a poem rhymed but didn't scan. Today of course, a poem that rhymes is uncool and too old school, fool.

I haven't mentioned this guy by name. You've noticed that? It's because I don't want some grieving friend of his to Google his name, and read this, and have some pangs of pain. Nothing personal. It's just that I finally got around to pointing out how awful modern poetry is. There are dozens and dozens of THIS guy...self-famous members of Academia who can go into a bookstore and maybe find a slim tome in that dusty "Poetry" section. The kind who do poetry readings where everyone's half asleep except the poet waiting to come on next.

I loved poetry when I was in school, and I even loved the guys who didn't rhyme, and who were being revolutionary in some kind of a good way, and, once in a while, with a sense of humor. But I have to admit, it was disappointing to buy a book compiling by Starbuck or Hollo, and finding way too many poems that were like variations on the Sunday Times crossword puzzle. As in, "I'm supposed to decode this?"

Perhaps, like classical music, and jazz, poetry was played out as an art form 50 or 100 years ago, with very little new material coming out with any power, originality, accessibility or entertainment value. Now it's a rare exception when somebody can knock off a funny poem that matches W.S. Gilbert or Spike Milligan, or free verse that aims for the heart and not the intellect and isn't Maya Angelou Hallmark ooze. We're not going to encounter anything like "The Highwayman" but, as Phil Ochs put that poem to music, we do find that lyricists took up the challenge, and Ochs, Dylan, Harry Chapin even, and others, have written "story poems" in lyric form. In fact, in reverse form, and without Academia's help, you can buy "the lyrics of..." Bob Dylan, Keith Reid and Paul Simon in hardcover book form, and study the words without the music.

I remember talking to Billy Joel once, and he said, "I won't call myself a poet." He was either being humble or avoiding pretentiousness. Some of his lyrics, in fact most of them, are better than the "poem" you see above. "BENN" theme. To use a Long Island phrase, "what the FUCK is THAT?" Why am I supposed to care about this guy's jottings? Is 9 Columbus Square supposed to mean something to me? Did he mention the number because of his ego, or because there's MYTHOS about the number NINE? Should I be mortified that I have no idea who Molesworth is, or whether that's a real name or not? What's a "hum colored cab?"

Is it possible that if I brought this poem in to some PROFESSOR at NYU or CUNY or mailed it to two dozen literary magazine, I'd get nothing but rejections and scorn?

A poet died. And poetry isn't doing so well either.