Most poetry’s pretty fucked up. It tries hard to be hard. Not only hard to understand, but also hard to touch – hard to feel. Sentiment isn’t really welcome in poetry anymore, it’s been outlawed. Sentiment is bad for poetry. It eats up the poetry and excretes it as pure whiny mush. As is usually the case, sentiment wasn’t outlawed for just any old no-good-reason – it was kicked out ‘cause it’d started to misbehave so badly as to not be considered tolerable anymore. It had had too much to drink and was creeping everybody out with its nonsensical, overemotional whimpering. It was all in your face with its “The depths of my pain/ the drip of my drugs / today’s the day / I die” and it’s roughed-up, false bravado, driving everybody nuts. So... »
