Natural language or don't bother

[busker]

The older I get, the more I read, the less patience I have for affectation in poetry. Even a lot of what I used to think was great poetry, I now think is just okay, mostly because it can't exist without the aid of artifice, without the reader wilfully suspending that particular disbelief and agreeing to indulge with the speaker in the obviously false fantasy that the diction before us on the page is anything the speaker might actually utter in any context other than "poem on the page." 

It is harder to write poetry with plain language because now you actually have to just go find compelling ideas and images. There's no "I don't have much to say but it SOUNDS like I have something to say." You either bring an offering or an empty dish. None of this fancy-Tupperware-holding-a-single-dry-chicken-tender shit. 

Go read some James Tate, a poet who had the nerve to actually explore what a poem is at its essence, with all the emperor's decidedly not-new clothes stripped off. It's good for what ails, we swears, frodo bagginses.

There are obviously different kinds kd poetry, and a surfeit of bland everyday language poems has its own drawback.
Is Dylan Thomas affected? Of course, but would that we all were similarly affected
A lot of modern poetry gives you forgettable epiphanies in trying to be natural all the time. Natural speech is overrated. Most people have nothing to say.

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Like the Tom Snarskt pome.
I wish Tom could be magically transported to Sudan where he’s find things to talk about other than his fake suburban first world meditations.
I don’t care about your fucking beers and friends in Idaho with drinking problems. If you grew up with new leather shoes every year then you shouldn’t write poetry. Or write only love poetry and religious poetry. Otherwise I’m not interested in your vapid middle class art with its predictable nothingness. I’d rather watch an instagram reel.

What an intellectually and emotionally lazy opinion

I took you at your word and read James Tate. I want my five minutes back.
See, in real life I have no time for utterly brain dead suburban creatures, professor or not. And James Tate writes about people presumably like himself or those around him. Utterly vapid suburban creatures. With zero experience of the wider world. With no real intellectual life. If that is what his poetry is about / perhaps he’s written something good at some point, I only read three - then I’d rather watch Family Guy on YouTube.

That’s a well considered opinion

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrym...=4&page=31

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Egad, what a dull poem. Like JD Salinger in verse.