National Poetry Month Death Match

Rauan Klassnik pits Jereme Dean against me in a passionate NaPoMo debate at HTMLGIANT.

My position:

Do organized NaPoMo efforts make your poetic practices any less valid or artful or subversive? Turn your own poems into gimmicks? If your neighbor makes his poems mainstream, will that turn your poems mainstream? If so, maybe the problem is your weak-ass poems. Poems are supposed to endure.

If your neighbor reads his poem on PBS, will PBS come for your poems next? Save your tin-foil hat for a bigger threat.

Versus Jereme’s position:

For me, authentic poetry is the only genuine form of man’s concept of beauty.

This is why the MFA in poetics is laughably worthless. Why frumps ejaculating every day for a month is egotistical self-aggrandizement. And why professors with unblemished hands analyzing the symbolic merit of a red wheelbarrow is considerably pathetic.

In other words, National Poetry Month is fucking dumb.

Read it all here.