Do you like writing poetry? Fine!
Poetry is just so easy these days – its blank verse for the blank generation, a freestyle free-for- all – yes it’s the only way.
All forms, from the fractured remnants of archaic stanzas to the modish Modernism of open field, process and beyond, are available to the auteur.
Pick-and-mix as you like! But reject ever more sharply the vainglorious folie de grandeur of epic high seriousness. Instead, embrace the cardinal virtues – and what are they? Convulsive beauty, automatism, objective chance (phrases taken at random from a top hat, or the mass media), black humour (nothing is sacred), mad love (the amatory mode always appeals) and – no offence! – Total, absolute, freedom of expression.
Oppose the literary ideologies of the last four decades, put yourself on a collision course with ‘theory’, pour scorn on the fashionable nonsense of radical chic linguistic obsessions – it is hardly surprising, you might say, that the chattering classes of academia are fixated on language.
We all know that the best work is always off the radar.
So, what’s it all about?
As always, the answer is Style.
A.C.Evans