Poetry on the Rocks
by Derick Varn

Yeats once declared, "Now I'm king of the cats," when the poet Swinburne died. With typical drunken Irish pride, good old Yeats never apologized for being both amazing great and really insane. It seems that there is no king of cats in America, despite what the static intelligentsia like Donald Hall and Robert Bly would have us believe.

You don't see poetry in most non-academic magazines anyone. You don't hear the average person raving about any poem that was written in the past hundred or so years.

A teacher I had in high school said, "All the poets are now songwriters." This scares me. The pop songwriters who rape poetry with cliche' lyrics, trite rhyme, and pathetic sex references are America's poets. It's true, that's about as close to popular poets as you get. Sometimes, I listen to the radio and get sick to my stomach, I wonder what weird genetic defect is inherent to Americans to allow them to enjoy this over-studio produced crap. Backstreet Boys as poets, the thought drives me to vomiting.

Tonight there is a huge storm coming in-freezing rain, snow, and/or sleet. Any is enough to send Georgians flooding the grocery hoarding everything from cheese to condoms. Of course, playing in the background of these grocery stores will be those dapper poets, Backstreet Boys. As I pick up the much needed razor while I wait in the horde, I wonder if I could find the fucking speakers and disembowel them-I know machines don't have bowels so work with me here.

Tomorrow the poet Bin Ramke may be reading a few of his very cerebral poems at the University I attend. I don't expect anyone to be there-cerebral poetry tends to have the same effects on the average student as the Backstreet Boys have on me. I will be there, but I am a poet, I have to keep up with the trade.

Since the dreaded "Winter Storm" may hit tomorrow, Ramke will probably not have a crowd to read to anyway. Oddly enough, this saddens me, Ramke's works is amazing and I probably won't get to hear it for another couple of months. Still there would not have been a large crowd anyway-myself and a few other poets sitting quietly pretending to be 60's beatniks. Poetry is only still taken seriously on college campuses and maybe not even there. The Ramke reading illustrates this as graphically as Hustler does women.

The indy 'zines and the Internet have produced some phenomenal poets and poetry. Although you have swim through the shit-seas of Hallmark card style poetry on occasion, a lot of the best poems I have ever read have been on the Internet and street 'zines. This e-zine, Moria, Bohemian Ink, Slope, and Big Bridge have published or given access to more cutting edge poetry that speaks to people in the past year than most of the academic literary journals do in two or three.

'Zine and Spoken Word poetry are the last line in a front in the survival of a dying art form. Even though I wear a shit-eating grin when I say this, I would rather have the Internet, as trendy as it may be, be the future of poetry as opposed to five-person boy bands.

Derick Varn is a poet and longstanding contributor to Unlikely Stories. Check out his literary works at this site.