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3 Stooges teach the alphabet
Category: humor
How to Avoid Fleeting Poetry Trends
Step1
Develop and keep your own style. Trust your instincts about what sounds best with your education, theories, influences and place in the poetry hierarchy.
Step2
Adopt what you truly like, but recognize that it may not be the last word forever.
Step3
Understand the process. Be aware of why, as well as when, a poetry trend is cooling. Poetry trends and fads can happen because a style is cool (spontaneous bop prosody) or fun (flarf) or even shocking (the gurlesque).
Step4
Adapt the style you want to adopt. For example, is everyone writing short short poems but you just can’t? Add an extra stanza to your poems so you can write them short but not as short as everyone else.
Step5
Mix trendy words with classic ones.
Step6
Break some rules; bend others. If the poetry fashion is proceduralism, try writing eight poems of eight lines each instead of retyping the whole goddamn newspaper. If slow poetry is in, use long vowels and dying metaphors before you actually opt to O.D. on barbituates.
Step7
Develop confidence: Take a class, read poetry magazines, get a poetics lesson, get your MFA done.
Step8
Learn about poetry, style, tips and tricks, then go out and make your own poetry news.
Tips & Warnings
- Take a long look at yourself before you go on a poetry safari. Will those politics go with your voluptuous sensibilities and your weakness for beatnik paraphernalia?
- Realize that a stylish writer with purple prose can carry it off if he’s confident.
- Impulse poems are for gratification in haste and repentance at length.
More from Louis Aragon’s Treatise on Style:
Humor is of the opinion that where there is a solution there is no humor.
….
Humor is the negative condition of poetry, which perhaps is ambiguous but which means that in order for there to be poetry humor must first get rid of antipoetry, and suddenly a spool of thread takes on the life of humor. And so, if you are a poet, you make a pretty woman with it, or the rippling of the water in the singing coral. Humor is the sine qua non of poetry, that is what I am saying in a roundabout way.
….
Literary images are in fact the vehicles of humor, and by proportional reciprocity, humor is what gives an image its force. Compare two images taken at random and you will be reduced to dust. Which also explains the way they age, for humor is assigned to an image only for a short time, and as soon as it has remounted its motorcycle, the wall begins to crumble. This is the basis of the idea of poetic novelty, about which there has recently been so much commotion. And rightly so. The neighbors complained; they are pains in the ass, we will not go back to our tired-out metaphors, we will not slip into the shoes of habit. We want to hear a catapultic language, one that will make the ceiling cave in and the earth tremble. Poetry is by nature stormy, and every image should produce a cataclysm. Let it burn! The thermogenic cotton of the poem.
Otohime 