Augury

I ran across this post by Mencius of Unqualified Reservations. The article, despite it’s rather impressive length, is a definite must-read. Mencius looks at a few poems by a man named Tryfon Tolides, in his book called “An Almost Pure Empty Walking,” and savages them:

I hasten to note that no one could possibly consider An Almost Pure Empty Walking a major work. In fact, it is unusually bad. But it is not atypically bad. And its badness has a kind of Platonic simplicity to it - an almost pure empty badness - that will help us, I feel, in the ugly work of diagnosis that lies ahead.

The real meat here is looking at everything that surrounds the poetry — Looking at the incestuous ponzi schemes that have poisoned “the Arts” in general or Poetry specifically and led to the creation of an artistically-stagnant, in-bred crowd of self-proclaimed elites.

I am reminded of something I overheard someone saying many years ago while discussing Greek playwrights. I forget the exact words, but the gist of it was this: “Isn’t it reassuring that even thousands of years ago all of these great creative geniuses thought like I do?”