"fellowships" poems - Hello Poetry

All these stanzas look alike they talk about the same things with the same words, the same poem written over and over again like voices, whispers, copying each other unable to feel and trust experience differently, socialized for homogeneity unified but dull, strong but obedient their writing seemed the narratives of machines unable to innovate plagiarizing voices they believed were their own, authentic, pure their literary journals were a politics of masters of arts and agendas of contests like car commercials without a proper enjoyment of speed, or our favorite writers whose names we only knew because they were the ones who died at the right time while somebody was looking, reading them but the bookstores didn’t know their metaphors were weak, or their life’s work was merely symbolic, that’s the thing isn’t it poets are only symbols, as poems are only fluff, paper, the labor of writers-in-residence while the rest of the world are more interested in serial killers and which stocks might be worth getting into, and when to sell out investing in words seemed silly to them and, in my selected works there was nothing of how to be a Poet Laureate or how to win prizes exceptional or not, publication was left to amazon state grants, fellowships, visiting writers academics who never felt truly how to write poetry at its heart was a colonization of artists few could share what that meant, we were the first illiterate generation, spending more time with the internet than with books.

0

Oct 18, 2014

Oct 18, 2014 at 12:04 PM UTC

wuji-shiu

On the decline of literacy

All these stanzas look alike they talk about the same things with the same words, the same poem written over and over again like voices, whispers, copying each other unable to feel and trust experience differently, socialized for homogeneity unified but dull, strong but obedient their writing seemed the narratives of machines unable to innovate plagiarizing voices they believed were their own, authentic, pure their literary journals were a politics of masters of arts and agendas of contests like car commercials without a proper enjoyment of speed, or our favorite writers whose names we only knew because they were the ones who died at the right time while somebody was looking, reading them but the bookstores didn’t know their metaphors were weak, or their life’s work was merely symbolic, that’s the thing isn’t it poets are only symbols, as poems are only fluff, paper, the labor of writers-in-residence while the rest of the world are more interested in serial killers and which stocks might be worth getting into, and when to sell out investing in words seemed silly to them and, in my selected works there was nothing of how to be a Poet Laureate or how to win prizes exceptional or not, publication was left to amazon state grants, fellowships, visiting writers academics who never felt truly how to write poetry at its heart was a colonization of artists few could share what that meant, we were the first illiterate generation, spending more time with the internet than with books.