NEW ::: POETRY Apr. 2015 | Page 21

I quaff up the ebony librettos from the no-frills, bloodless backdrop, as a sprog with a creamy chocolate shake: intense in my anticipation, my grey matter hopelessly hunting for stimulus, as from the engaging, incisive, immutable declarations of the bards of time gone by. At the end of my examining a writers’ and critics’ magazine and newsletter, all I gleaned was the groaning air, gurgling in the bottom of a slimy glass. Eager and hungry, I had unsealed myself to absorb their supposed words of wisdom? The callivers’ utterances did not convince me, ferment in My reminiscence, or nestle into my cavernous sub-conscious. Barren and uninspired, I had craved a poetic cocktail of Plathonian delectability; with the forceful, metaphorical froth only Mayakovsky’s stanzas induce and swell. These are the kind of concoctions which never cease to penetrate highminds: each wordy imbroglio, each metaphor and honorary crown of barbarous, hyperbolic thorns have lacerated their way into my labyrinth-like temple and quintessence: they resurrect me and hold fast in the grottos of my soul, indelible, as no clique-dominated critic, or crone’s shallow observations, will ever earn the supremacy, or privilege to, within me. Contemporary poetry is dull, diaphanous, intimidated and ransacked by uniformless, poetry police: fearfully followed by the pusillanimous and brainwashed poltroons. Newfangled prosaic eddas are scanty as rain in fog: they lack clout, as a retired pugilist; and leave no traces, as professional thieves. Where have the Revolutionary, high-calibre, riskall, courageous poets gone? To the grave! Eradicated! Extinct as dodos! Driven by debacle into declivity, and an untimely death by divisive diatribes. I salute my comrades of quondam: they will spur me on as a battling balladeer, until I die. No middle-class turn out will ever dictate to me the style - or manner - in which I shall create. My eristic words will zoom through the academic cosmos, focussed as manic meteorites; scorching through packs of cut-throat, evanescent critics, with phoney, holier-than-though pomposity and trifling, controlling opinions. Believe me! Megalomania is rife in critical literary circles! But expressions... ..., which span the dynamic viaducts of epochs, as valiant armies, then detonate, potent as dynamite, decades later, they are the poems that survive and outfox all half-baked manoeuvres of critics: they render doctrinaire arbiters sublime. The Revolutionary recruits those valorous, dead poets enlist are the bards of the future; of this I insist. We care not for identification in judges’ blinkered eyes, as we