Bearing as I do this enormous lung, and finding myself urged into the not-altogether-solemn office of sniffing out what flame-lets of reactionary condescension and spiritual opportunism may be found eating fuel in the creational oven of a poet I have often witnessed at work behind the aesthetical curtain, I will, in this direct address, describe some of those methods and practices of his, which, by my reckoning, should forthwith meet their unconditional discontinuance.
I begin, dear and long-standing friend, with a subject that I imagine will awaken certain pains within your heart. Your poems clearly refer to a number of romantic engagements with distinct individuals, collating not unmanagerially a corpus of attributive qualities selected from your not-unfeverish understanding of those your lovers, manufacturing an untouchable super-muse from choice-ass cuts of personal flesh, which condition of your lyrics may be apprehended by even a perfunctory encounter — and now it must be my heart that is pained as I add that the perfunctory is the only sort endurable, unless perhaps by certain extra-invested readers specifically appropriated and harmed therein — with your latest pamphlet. Your instrumentalization of women who trusted you with their most private intimacies is at best cannibalism: the vast remains of their lives you abolish from your imagination, if I may favour precisely the wrong word for it, the treasure having been scraped from the rind, or so you thought.
Where to start? Consider that it is not desire’s human whisper to which discerning ears of your poems attend, but rather, the air of the toilet’s flush, viciously one-directional, pulled by your own lavishly begloved right hand. As your address fails to differentiate the lovers to whom it calls, they are cut and mixed together into a single fecal mass, every phrasal object tallied all upon the blazon, its ledger of intestinal evacuations. Perhaps it is as yet imperfectly clear to you the degree to which this is the pervasive social reality of much of your art?
Yet surely not unavailable to you is consciousness of those formal delicacies of prosodical affect with which the contemporary page is so ill-adorned, not least by yourself, with all their imprintations and multiplications of such confusions and mystifications (as to the nature of things) as unaccommodate the proper diagnostic of dialectical materialism! Out of superstitious commitment to heroic eccentricity of person, you persist in iterating the backwards slide into poetestical fancy-dress. Even letting you snuggle your snuggles-redolent toy, “struggle,” apprehensive of the tantrums its confiscation would reliably conjure, your self-declared technical prowess is no passionate consequence of any struggle, through immanent world-attendance, to paint the serrated counterlay of the metrics of social exploitation and freedom therefrom, but is, rather, a self-incriminating uniform concocted for professional admittance into a doubly misnomered intellectual elite, through whose ranks you foresee your elevation on the merits of the petrifical mastery of your verses, which claim I expect you will contest by quoting Thomas Carlyle: “All uniforms shall be good, so they hold in them true and valiant men.” (Having saved you the trouble, I would inquire with no mean sum of aggression as to whether your failure to read the same author’s humorous defense of slavery has yet to be rectified, which I know too well to be not the case.) How could the complex of your class aspirations and material affluence display itself with any more ostentation than as by your determination to build your poems out of such artefactual literary devices as those to which I have here alluded? Understand the fatality, trusted friend, of retaining even the slightest moiety of the belief that you can continue to play at actually being Ezra Pound.
I turn now to your servility to a fantasy of historical ambition, the varied expression of which includes the habit of maintaining a secret writing practice housed in private notebooks, where every sparking glitch of ink is an essential stroke in your fantastical mastertext, as if your true book were written with a pen of living fire, not the industrial pen endowing the mechanisms of publication. Concomitant with this is your fear that your art will suffer contamination by the ink of other “poets” (who you deem to have made insufficient proof of their genius), with an especial fear of friends, musicians, prison labourers, theatre-makers, carpenters, family members, call-centre employees, and food service workers, to name but a few of those of whose participation in your compositions you are unable to countenance the possibility. Can it be true that I have seen you directly unauthorize your own contributions to poems written in a spirit of ecstatic collective spontaneity? Yes. I trust that it will not be taken amiss if I speculate that your obsession with your own name is no small part of your poetry’s wounding aura of mild irrelevance.
Having crashed into my word-count, I continue in brief. Your poetry is impoverished theatre and your learned allusions are all to books by dead white guys. Even your vaunted energy is but the treguna mekoides tracorum satis dee of your semen-infused inventory contorting as it stiffens. You take a disgustingly religious pleasure in obscurity, you labour too much over your edits, and you employ pseudonyms uncourageously. To be continued.