Tuesday, February 11, 2020

On Critical Writing: A Poem

Feral packs of prepositional phrases roam
modifying the weak and the young

Adrift, verbs activate anything too slow to escape
anything
everything
verbless

Pull quotes blunder through the text
like particularly stupid elephants
quoting random scraps of drivel
it doesn't matter

A rectangular word-blob hangs feckless on the page
meaning nothing
smelling vaguely of stale knock-off erudition

The whole corpulent edifice trembles
wobbles
speaks
moistly
slurring as it were through thick drunken lips

"I read a lot but nothing really
  adheres
  but I learned to write this way from my peers
  endless winding phrases turgid with semiotic weight
  never realized
  unconnected
  with a period dropped in whenever I remember to do that
  and then I remind myself
  to capitalize
  The next word."

This poem is available as a limited edition Ultraprint

2 comments:

  1. Very moving... Of course, in fairness *now* you're going to have to critique contemporary American poetry, in comparison to which critical writing on photography is the proverbial fish in a barrel. Good luck!

    Mike

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