I STILL DON’T “GET” POETRY READINGS | HTMLGIANT

Poetry readings must be as well written as music performances.

To get to why I’ve titled this article “I Still Don’t ‘Get’ Poetry Readings,” though, I’ll tell you it’s because I don’t. I don’t “get” poetry readings. I don’t “get” them not for a lack of trying. I don’t “get” them because I don’t understand what readings hope to achieve within the broader framework of culture. I’ve been to many poetry readings, some of which have moved me so deeply that I cried (Tomaž Šalamun) and some of which have failed to reach me (though also not for a lack of trying). Despite how very different poetry readings can be from one another, I’ve noticed that they all share the same quality of autonomy. It seems to me that the poetry reading desires to be a space that exists for itself and through itself. My complaint, however, isn’t with the poetry reading’s desire for autonomy but rather with the inaccessibility this desire creates.

Another plagiarism scandal hits poetry community

I post this mostly to immortalize this epic comment from someone called (I kid you not) Amazeballs:

“I don’t see how these very rare cases of plagiarism create ‘a cloud of suspicion over new writers’. It’s just the sort of thing I personally enjoy about the poetry world, which, to be honest, does take itself a shovel load too seriously most of the time.
Last time with Ward the amount of nauseatingly smug and self-righteous guff spouted by po-biz newbies and those seeking to instruct and serve them as role models, demonstrated how irrelevant most contemporary poetry is to a majority of readers steering well clear of it. People working themselves up into a lather, calling for his head on a plate, demanding his execution, becoming incredibly angry and protective of Helen Mort as if she were some tender flower in need of protecting from a neanderthal scumbag, instead of a very intellgient Oxbridge graduate ruthlessly talented and supremely poetical. Several of the more morally pure chaps wanting to bash the granny out of Ward, posturing as if on a playground. All very theatrical, everyone claiming to be only interested in behaving in a way that is for ‘the good of poetry’; as if Poetry were something tame and inoffensive, to be appropriated and owned by a caste of morally spotless educators perpetuating a homogenized brand of ultra-bland poetry written not as private prayer from the soul because it has to be, the poem itself its own reward, but as a laboured dot to dot exercise of the middle class careerist bourgeoisie braying for the blood of some poor mixed up middle aged man feeling the worst he’s ever felt; at the lowest point in his life and in need of understanding and forgiveness from the individual poets he plagiarized and who will be, if they are normal human beings, pleased with the compliment of being ripped off.
What this shouldn’t become is an opportunity for a lot of people to jump on a moralizing bandwagon in which we drone faux outrage written for the purpose of appearing morally right on, putting on in the public square a facade, how dare he, well, hmm, how best can I appear to be engaged, what can I say to make me look as if I give a fuck?
Voices. voices, tis all but air and fury from the gob within. Innit?”

David R Morgan admits to passing numerous works by other people as his own and says he is ‘truly sorry’