Giggling In The Face of Doom [or, Lilly In the Field of Poetry]

There’s a big hoopla going on about what Poetry magazine is, perhaps, doing with the millions of dollars the late Ruth Lilly donated to the outfit during the roaring nineties.

Seems despite the recent downturn the magazine’s assets have grown to $200 million and its staff stands accused of enjoying the good life.

I heard all about it from the godforsaken Chicago Tribune. It was pretty gruesome going for a sensitive poet-type like myself. There should be a rating system on such coverage, something that warns “for insensitive readers only.”

Here’s the offending article ... You be the judge.

And now that you’ve read it and perhaps done a little research of your own, here’s what I think:

All the money and related bullshit aside, when was the last time Poetry Inc. did anything interesting, substantial, important, influential...? Even before Lilly’s donation, was it doing anything?

The best way to kill art is to smother artists with money [it's my hoped-for cause of death]. An actual artist can be wrecked, I think, with too much money. If I were a rich patron, I would consider it my responsibility to fuck with an artist's mind in equal proportion to the money I gave, so his/her angst would be nurtured not soothed. I would personify "the man" for them because I prefer their psychotic pictures and texts to their pretty ones. I'd give the artist as much shit as s/he could handle, no more and no less.

Having enough is vital, but too much is deadly. The money basically took Poetry from a shoestring budget of nothing special and turned it into a corporation that needs to "play nice" for PR reasons.

Unlike us [sentient biological entities, not just legal persons], corporations seek to avoid dangerous artistic malfunctions [i.e.: stuff resulting in higher expenses and lower profits, embarrassment].

The corporate system and its sibling bureaucracy are the greatest evils in the world today...maybe ever because they seem so benign and necessary relative to fascism and communism, of which they're actually kin, the rich relatives of bastard children, one big illegitimate family of dis-eased inhuman ideologies.

People are slowly waking up to this fact, but I fear it's already too late. We're poised to see a cataclysmic drop in the world's human population resulting from an onslaught of catastrophes—magnetic field reversal, climate change, peak everything, nitrogen imbalance, dying oceans, famine, pestilence, war, disease, pandemic. People with children are going to have incredible, unbelievable, unprecedented horror, stress and anxiety to deal with. Their children will kill them, will be the reason they struggle to survive, will necessitate some form of law and order out of fear and exhaustion ... eventually ...and those people who most people fear and are tired of will be outlawed, institutionalized, jailed and/or killed. Even more so than today! C'est la vie.

And somewhere along the line it's likely that human mutations will begin appearing who, as new humans, will do to us what we Cro-Magnons possibly did to the Neanderthals: fuck and murder them/us out of existence. The new breed will, perhaps, be more OJ than Jesus. By the time the meek inherit the earth no one will want it. So it goes.

And of course, at some point a giant asteroid will strike, or something else like anomalous sun spot and flare activity will happen, ending hominid existence on the third planet from the sun...

We're all going to die...so it seams.

Thus [hate the tone of that word, the diction it implies, but its use seams correctly, hearing here the ear that says “ergo” would feel a step too far...] from Ruth Lilly's donation that kills Poetry to the end of the world. Only fitting we see the pernicious effects of ruling class "drug money."

I know. I go too far...But why not? Everything the profit/prophet-driven commie-fascists touch turns to shit! Global corporate libertarians merely think of flowers and their attention wilts flora far and wide...

So part of my life's mission, anyway, is to keep Thanatos' ideas away from my flowers...distract death and keep it at bay…wherever it lurks, blind it with my light and run like hell.

Amen.

For some reason, I can’t help giggling about all this…