Why is it that people who belch & fart & swear & mispronounce words & get falling-down drunk & then talk about it obsessively, people who never express an idea of more than one dimension, people who proudly boast of having read nothing more than the back of a cereal packet--why is it that those people are called "real" & "honest" & are treated like the posessors of high virtue? Since Bukowski even most of the poets have fallen into the thrall of this ghastly post-Enlightenment new-Dark-Age cliche, though the arrival of Paul Skyrm on the scene suggests that there may be something new & exciting & (damn!) intelligent about to happen in poetry. In our society--in England if not anywhere else--anybody who is well-read or declines to swear & doesn't drink or prefers not to talk about sex or expresses himself (or herself) in a complex or abstract way is laughed at, seen as pompous, false (as if the truth is shit & puke & cum & not occasionally Heaven too); they are even seen as socially crippled, & pitied for not having proper lives like the rest of us.
Now, don't misunderstand me. I belch. I fart. I swear. I get drunk. But I'm not under the illusion that it makes me a model citizen.
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