PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION IX

Our society was in a shabby state already when experience presided over essence, when ‘eat, and drink, and be merry’ mattered more than who you were and where you came from. But this practical atheism leads to existentialism or nihilism, or to each one of them back and forth. So people commonly go from trying to hope in, or experience, something above what they believe in (existentialism) to feeling hopeless and acting like it because they find no reason to believe that life is meaningful (nihilism.) Not only are words dead; Western civilization is dying. It could live; but it doesn’t have the will. When rationalist man becomes too proud to rely on the God of the Bible, he seeks truth without God’s revelatory help. Finding no truth, he quits looking for it, and tries to be satisfied with eating, drinking, and making merry: drugs, drinks, cars, traveling, sports, sex, or what have you. After this fails to satisfy, existential angst takes over and wins out. So he seeks a grandiose experience to have faith in or he falls into a condition of hopelessness. Seeking no more the truth because they think it can’t be found, the rationalist philosopher and the postmodern poet go about killing off communication; and the lost society that they exhibit goes about dismantling or demolishing everything that a belief in God’s truth once built. “Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation” (Matthew 12.25.) We need the power of God in Jesus to exclaim, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23.34.) But ignorance and impenitence may prevail in order to bring judgment down for sin. After Jesus rose from the dead, he stated, “Ought not Christ to have suffered these things, and to enter into his glory?” (Luke 24.25, 26.) It may be that the epitaph of Western civilization will be, “Ought not it to have suffered these things, and to enter into bedlam and hell?” 

The condition of today’s poet is one of despair. He is as articulate as a ‘reconstructed ancyclical’ and as pointless as ‘a tin wing in the wind.’ Like in Two Ghazals, he ‘never sees the sun’ and always ‘looks for the darkest place,’ even when he speaks of ‘the Bread of Heaven’—the Bread of Heaven who is, the Bible says, ‘the light of the world.’ If he had ever eaten this Bread, there would be no despair, his darkness would be flooded with light and color, and poetry marked by entropy would die off. There is no coming out of this condition unless despair is not so far gone as to make dread impossible. Despair is to lose hope, maybe to the point of hopelessness; dread, however, may lead to hope through faith. The poet of our time is in a state of despair because his philosophy is not filtered through faith in a transcendent personality.

About John Thompson’s last book of poems, Patrick Lane says, “The poems are sometimes grim but they are by a poet writing at the farthest reach of his mind.” If the poems are like the Two Ghazals, they must be entirely grim and they must come from, not only the farthest, but the darkest and deadest part of his mind. The character in Two Ghazals, together with the author himself, is in a state of despair that was wrought from the philosophical belief that truth cannot be found and should not be sought. Each soul that has abandoned, is at odds with, or is distanced from, the truth wherein the remedy is for both despair and dread, must not dally with time. He has no time to waste on playing with words to form meaningless verse. Before despair becomes utter despair, it is possible for a sense of dread to lead to prayer, life, and relief. “I have not sought Thee, I have not found Thee,/I have not thirsted for Thee:/And now cold billows of death surround me,/Buffeting billows of death astound me,—/Wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see/Thy perishing me?” (Christina Rossetti, Love is Strong as Death.) The voice in this 19th century poem goes from dreading to seeking in an instant. Conversely, the distinguishing mark of postmodernism is resolute skepticism. If you believe that certain knowledge is unobtainable, and you are a writer, you might see no use for reason or rules and no rationale to make sense, much less to create beauty. It will seem reasonable, then, even though reason itself is not believed in, to despair. But if sin has not filled its measure to end in despair yet, the soul may reach up and out to the God that he has been told does not exist, and ask, even while ‘buffeting billows of death astound’—: “wilt Thou look upon, wilt Thou see/Thy perishing me?” The poet of this present age, like the people whose lives reflect the bleak world of the poet’s miserable verse, is fast approaching an irremediable, irredeemable end in the absence of God’s favor.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION VIII

Circling back, now, to Thompson’s Two Ghazals to finish off this present put-down of postmodern verse: In his brief commentary, as noted earlier, Mr. Lane quotes Thompson’s reason for using this form of poetry (which has no form): “My interest in the form lies in the freedom it allows—the escape from brief lyric unity.” Mr. Lane interprets: “So the poems move as the mind moves, quickly, leaping from association to association, from image to thought, from idea to rhythm.” They leap because connecting thoughts are not supplied.   

Thompson’s “interest in the form lies in the freedom it allows—the escape from brief lyric unity.” What is he freeing himself from? He is freeing himself from the hard work of composing real poetry: concise, comprehensible verse that is songlike and lucid. He is freeing himself from making intelligible statements. He is freeing himself from the limitations of making sense. This is frightening because the poet represents, to a degree, the age in which we live. The fact is that millions of people parallel Thompson’s broken poetry in their fragmented, disjointed, inconsistent lives. There are souls who hold to no planned routine to advance in life because welfare and charity are no longer linked to responsibility and a sense of gratitude. People leap from association to association because the thread of truth no longer holds friendships together. They leap from fornication to church to fornication and back because connections between faith, obedience, and church discipline have been severed. Or a pastor, in his preaching, leaps from the love of God to forgiveness because love and forgiveness have been cut off from the doctrines of sin, condemnation, and repentance. This is easily demonstrated by the fact that most Christians believe it is their duty to forgive others regardless of whether the duty of repentance is fulfilled by the guilty party. (But see Luke 17.3, 4.) This idea of unconditional forgiveness is a falsehood that comes straight from the pulpit, which, these days, is just the world’s lectern inside the church. Churchgoers even talk of forgiving themselves, which is as unbiblical an act as it is an impossible one. Frustration is rampant because confusion is ubiquitous. If we have no system of truth in our minds—if our minds are not connected to a system of truth—we will not lead systematic, satisfying, orderly lives. The system of theology is as dead to the pastor as the elements of poetry are dead to the poet. It is natural and appropriate to laugh at modern art and staccato poetry. We should laugh these abominations out of every department of humanity. But we should cry at how our lives are walking, breathing Ghazals. Like these Ghazals, we are not defined. We don’t know what or who we are. We are more than ‘tin wings in the wind’; but we scarcely act like it. Large numbers of us are as connected to the philosophy of Thompson’s poems as his poems are disconnected in thought. We must be driven by fear to seek integrity of life. Churches need to teach and enforce the conjunctions between doctrine, faith, and obedience; Christians in name only need actual new life through doctrine faithfully communicated and spiritually applied; and atheistic unbelievers need to start from scratch by acknowledging there is an infinite-personal God to be reckoned with and reconciled to.   

Today’s poet can communicate. He does it every day. He engages very well to get his disengaging poetry noticed by newspaper editors and literary judges. But without knowing it, and thinking his poetry is good and maybe great, he fulfills a fatal role by writing a word that is as crazy as the world is bent. There is a wicked harmony in this. And it is decreed, no doubt, by an angry, offended God. It is not just for the Amorites of old to fill up the measure of their iniquity (Genesis 15.16.) The Amorites are no exception. Filling up the measure, as Jesus puts it, is a principle carried over into New Testament times (Matthew 23.32; Romans 9.22.) It is to the purpose of bringing down wrath ‘to the uttermost’ for the commission of sin (1 Thessalonians 2.16.) It is a principle that carries over unto us. Writers, like everyone else, must fill up the measure of their iniquity because God will have his fill of judging. “But I say unto you, that every idle word that men shall speak, they shall give account thereof in the day of judgment” (Matthew 12.36.)

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION VII

The apostle Paul exhorts Timothy to hold fast the ‘form of sound words,’ by which he means, ‘Christian doctrine’ (2 Timothy 1.13.) How lamentable is it to have to exhort our anti-intellectuals (our university professors and their radical students) to hang on to English sense! In that same letter to Timothy, the apostle Paul prophesies the coming of a ‘form of godliness’ among professors of Christianity; in other words, a religion in outward form only, without authenticity and power. Our phony poets are like these empty professors of religion; they are empty professors of literature. In fact, their poems are not even on the level of outward form, as hypocritical professors of Christianity are. Even though they are extolled as the gurus of literature, they are counterfeits in their field; and, it is regretful and biblical to say, fools. (But for the grace of God go we.) If postmodernist poetry is groundbreaking, it breaks ground, not toward a new primitivism merely, but beyond primitivism toward that which is ‘without form, and void,’ where ‘darkness’ is ‘upon the face of the deep.’ The authors of monstrous verse like this must be lost souls indeed! Our prayer for these creatures of the deep must be, Let there be light, O God! Formless poems originate from darkness. Light from the voice of God is what their authors need the most. “O send out thy light and thy truth: let them lead me; let them bring me unto thy holy hill, and to thy tabernacles” (Psalm 43.3.) 

Undecipherable poems come predominantly, if not exclusively, from leftist milieus; this makes perfect sense. Leftist Duckspeak strikingly aligns, not with socialism merely, but with 1984’s socialist party, Ingsoc. By flipping through the parts of 1984 that I have highlighted, I am struck by how much today’s Left has in common with Ingsoc. Like Ingsoc, it came of age in the 1960s (p. 120.) Like Ingsoc, it tries to control the future by controlling the past; that is to say, by rewriting it (pp. 119, 125.) Like Ingsoc, it likes to keep small rules (like whether you can provide straws in your restaurant or not), but feels free to break big ones (like assisting illegal migrants and facilitating terrorism, p. 209.) Really, it will break any rule if it thinks it won’t get caught (p. 230.) It censors its opponents (p. 126) to such a degree as to remind us of ‘Thought Police’ (pp. 97, 100.) Its members are so robotically subservient to this ideology that they seem unconscious (p. 139.) Its most prejudiced adherents are young women (p. 97.) Its object is persecution for its own sake; and its end is power. Mark it, power is not its means, but its end (p. 338.) Its notion of Freedom is Slavery to the State (p. 339.) And, which brings us back to the subject at hand, its ‘heresy of heresies’ is ‘common sense’ (p. 162.) The Ingsoc of 1984 and the Postmodern Left are virtually the same thing. It is from this wicked womb that the worst of the worst writing is born. Stillborn literature may be given a semblance of life; but it cannot truly live; so it is destined not to last. If our neo-Marxists would use the embryotomy scissors on their literature instead of on the heads of babies in the womb, how much better off would the world be and how much less deserving of the LORD’s indignation and fury?         

When it is no longer deemed necessary for words to come together to form rational thoughts, writing has become purposeless employment. Maybe it has a little purpose, for words are still being used and the fingers are getting some exercise. The next step on the descending ladder is the use of non-words, like those CAPTCHA words that we are made to type in order to prove we’re not robots on internet sites—words like ‘tbilin’ and ‘baliti,’ the last two ‘words’ that I had to type into ‘Google Books’ in order to access a public domain document. We are already, to a degree, on this next step, for non-words like ‘ancyclical’ and ‘Ghazal’ are not hard to find in contemporary poems. It is now popular for poets to perplex instead of enlighten or even inform. Commenting on a poem by another blinding poet, Rita Dove, Mr. Lane says, “I leave this poem as mystified as I was when I entered it...Questions follow questions. A great poem does that. Sometimes there are no answers” (The Globe and Mail, June 17th, 2000.) Offer such poetry to 19th century England and you might qualify for a room in a lunatic asylum. Questions are more desired than answers because postmodern philosophy is about truth being undiscoverable, and therefore, unprofitable to look for.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION VI

Postmodern literature emerged out of the Leftist Marxism of the sixties. Or so I have read. I would rather call this literature ‘Progressive Deconstructionism’ because it progresses toward a complete disintegration of disclosure. If reason does not matter in so much of what universities teach, including poetry, it should be no surprise that basic facts are offensive to some students. And this is why the most radical among them riot when they do not get their way. Some postmodern poems are even less definite and more tenebrous than Thompson’s Two Ghazals. We should not let the complexion of this kind of poetry hang by just an example or two. And we don’t have to because I have an entire book of examples. Mercifully, the worthless volume was priceless, by which I mean: free. The opinion that this mad poetry was born in the mind of the Left is all but completely proven considering where the twenty-seven poets featured in the anthology reside. The installments, then, in this book called, Verse, Vol. 7, No. 1, are written by poets living where we would expect them to live: in democratic districts. Except for seven of them (five of whom have no place of residence given), they live in the following places: San Diego, San Francisco, Berkeley, northern California, Sebastopol (also in California), Washington State, Washington D. C., New York City, Connecticut, London (in England), Toronto, and Vancouver. Here follow two examples of postmodern verse from this book. They are, by no means, atypical; these two examples are pretty much what the whole book is like. I will give a whole stanza from each poet, not to suggest that taking poetry of this kind out of context is possible.         

From Making It Up by Rae Armantrout

What do you call it

when men dress up

as barber poles:

a different century

or an ice-cream parlor

full of crying kids?

A father hit one and said,

“I didn’t touch you.”

From Ruck by Lary Timewell

Reconstruction ancyclicals,

superencipherment of the

snug in antebellum, one

Ophuls needed to

smartkid antidote,

discuss expenditures,

turf lurkers,

bundle negatives,

scratch horses,

and shun statistics against

“a steady backbeat of abiding concerns,”

like, say,

Reconsider Baby.

 

Both poems defy explication except to say that they are inexplicable. The second of these is more than merely sesquipedalian: the inclusion of long words just because. A couple of its long words are invented, not out of thin air, but out of a brain that has been trained to believe that this is what poetry should look like and sound like. Obviously, these poems are impossible to interpret. The editor of this volume admits that footnotes would not help us to understand the meaning of such poetry, as it so frequently consists of what he honestly calls ‘wholesale derangement.’ Indeed, because more sense can be produced by the ‘See ‘N Say Story Maker’ by Mattel, a toy that combines prepared phrases to delight the toddler at the push of a button. I will push this button right now and get more sense from Mattel’s toy than from the two poems quoted above: “The cat sat on a fat goat on the moon.” One more time, because it’s so much fun to make fun of postmodern poetry: “The turkey kissed a barking ‘woof woof’ bug in my shoes.” 

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION V

About these Two Ghazals, Lane comments, “It proceeds by couplets not necessarily linked together by rational thinking.” This is correct. The poems are irrational. But then he adds, “They are examples of poetic logic.” This observation is a foolish follow-up because logic is ‘rational thinking,’ which is hardly irrational. Logic is the science of reasoning, or the ‘grammar of reason,’ as R. C. Trench calls it. Irrationality and logic are antithetical to each other. The poems cannot be examples of both. Logic is the process by which conclusions are reached through methodical thinking; and methodical thinking cannot be irrational thinking. The poems cannot be both irrational and logical, for something that is logical has gone through a process, not of irrationality, but of reason. Logic goes, then, with reason, not irrationality. That something—even a poem—is both irrational and logical at the same time, is a contradiction and impossibility. If the parts of something are not linked by rational thinking, it is absurd to assert that that something is logical. Contradictions of this kind are the norm in circles where truth is treated as relative. Truth as relative is itself a contradiction; therefore it is no surprise that irrational poems and irrational criticism flow from that secular tenet. The idea that truth is relative is a proposition that what is true for one person may be false for another; but relative truth is a chimera: that which exists in the imagination alone. We might imagine that one person believes that bread is nourishing while his fellow believes that a stone is nourishing and that neither person judges the other for what he eats and that each one eats his choice of food to good effect. That bread is a source of food is true. That the stone is a source of food is false. This is a fact no matter what a person imagines the truth to be. A stone for food only works in the imagination; irrational poems that are logical, likewise. “If a son shall ask bread of any of you that is a father, will he give him a stone?” (Luke 11.11.) Postmodern poetry is as dumb as stones. We ask for nourishment instead. It would be cruel to teach infants that stones will nourish their bodies. It is cruel to teach children that avant-garde poetry will nourish their minds. Only cruelty would coerce pupils to admire nonsense and to imitate the writing of it. But that is what postmodern poets and philosophers of relative truth, through academia, are guilty of. They push their chimerical inventions into classrooms and libraries because the only way people will pay a moment’s attention to what they write is by duress or by accident. People do not want to read material that is close to being absolutely incomprehensible. It is true that sinners are naturally bent against metaphysical truth as we have it in the Bible. But the rejection of God’s truth is near the top of our slippery slope. Near the bottom is the denial of common sense. Denial on this level is not to everyone’s liking because not everyone is as close to the bottom as experimental writers are. And this is where coercion and peer pressure come in. Even when modern art is as ugly as debris—even when innovation in poetry is imbecilic—what student couldn’t be pressured with a frown into denying the testimony of his intuition? Postmodern poetry is a playground for persons pretending to be poets. It could be ignored except for the fact that defenseless pupils are forced to read it, accept it, and even participate in it. At the back of the bus the other day, a mentally disadvantaged man blurted out, in fits and starts, words that seemed chosen at random. This is what the newest poetry is like, except for the fact that our poets don’t have acute mental illness for an excuse. A couple of teenage girls giggled embarrassingly each time the disabled man blurted out. We might blame them for this; but we should not blame them at all for laughing at retarded poetry.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION IV

It would be better for the reputation of the poet, John Thompson, to have it discovered that his poems were only doodles, and that before he could throw them out, someone—an enemy—submitted them to the paper in the author’s name in order to discredit his good character. But these newfangled poets mean what they say when they write their meaningless, meandering verse.  They believe that poems like these ought to use up paper and be dignified as parts of a book. If it were merely about the miscarriage of craft, poems like these would deserve a gentler return than inhospitable criticism. Anyone who has written poems has often missed the mark. Semel insanivimus omnes. (We have all played the fool once.) But poems like these—poems that insult our intelligence by communicating nothing more cerebral than a confession of mental derangement—are not fit even for lunatics to peruse. Off-the-wall writers of junk verse need to be shamed. Shame precedes repentance. Decadent writers need to be jarred into recognition of how mad their verses make them appear even to halfwits. The voice in Two Ghazals does confess to madness: “I’m quite mad: never see the sun.” But if Mr. Thompson’s intention is to write as a madman would, it’s not poetry, is it? And if this is poetry, the same thing can be said about it that ordinary people say about modern art: Anyone can do it, though most of us would rather do something constructive instead. No doubt, the author of Two Ghazals would have liked everyone to avow that this is poetry, regardless of what voice may be identified in it. No matter what praise this poet has been the recipient of, and no matter what progress poets of his school pretend to have made, these poems read like the reflections of a delusional soul. “If I wash my hands will I disappear?/I’ll suck oil from Tobin’s steel and walnut.” When men were more intelligent, though admittedly less advanced than we are scientifically, a person who uttered discordant speech from his imagination was evaluated, not by a literary critic, but by a doctor. From 1758: “Deluded imagination…is…an indisputable but an essential character of Madness” (W. Battie, A Treatise on Madness, pp. 5, 6.) Poems like Thompson’s Two Ghazals exhibit incongruity. Something that is made up of incongruous parts is called a chimera: an incongruous delusion. “The perception of Chimeras…exist no where except in the brain of a Madman” (Ibid., p. 42.) Is it not for our advantage that writings from the age of medical bloodletting may be used to shame our literary pretensions and daftest writers? From 1811: “Alas! not only darkness, thick as night, has overtaken them; they are bewildered in the imaginations of their disordered minds, and in the pursuit of fancied objects, or in the flight from fancied terrors, hurried into the midst of dangers” (Stevenson Maggill, On Lunatic Asylums, p. 11.) They are hurried into the midst of dangers—dangers like self-harm and suicide. Both Rothko and the author of Two Ghazals killed themselves. Poems like Two Ghazals convey less meaning than the medley of words that a person might remember from his last nightmare. It so happens that sometimes I recall sayings from my dreams and that sometimes I bother to write them down. For a teaching moment, I am fetching one of these right now. So in a dream, a woman said this to me: “When my world revolves around stories, I know I’m going to write one; when the world revolves around mine, I know I’ve written one.” This is a well-ordered proverb, notwithstanding the hubris of the ethereal woman who contrived it. Unlike the miscommunication in Two Ghazals, it is not only well-ordered, but discernible. Definite meaning may be gathered from it. The saying seems thoughtful enough to pass for the fruit of rumination. It is remotely possible that I subconsciously absorbed the proverb from a book or an audio medium and that it manifested in the unconscious state of my dream. I must say this because C. H. Spurgeon came by a whole sermon in a similar manner. But even allowing for this potentiality, isn’t it interesting that more meaning may be obtained by accident in the dream of a conservative Christian than can be found in poems painstakingly composed by a postmodern poet? This is so startling that it should be spine-tingling. What passes for poetry today bears the image of mental illness, the absence of pathology in the author notwithstanding. 

I was going to say that there aren’t any gems to be salvaged from the rubble of these two poems and that by a random trip to an actual dump more treasure might be found. There is one gem, however, in the first line of Thompson’s second poem, about which Patrick Lane’s comments are appropriate: “Listen to that beautiful ‘bangs a tin wing in the wind.’ The line flies away from you as if it were alive; the sounds feel wonderful in the mouth and ear.” I agree. Even a groundbreaking (in the ditch) poet can’t resist saying something charming when a lyrical clang (like the sound of a shovel scraping between stones in the mud, for example) flashes through his mind. There may be an interspersion of assonance or alliteration or some other marvel in whatever any poet writes. Even a vacuum cleaner can leave a pretty pattern in its wake. One of the most beautiful designs I ever saw was in the lines that a vacuum cleaner left at the front of a church. An artist could not have drawn the female form any better. In his autobiography a man testified to being arrested by a similar sight in a cloud formation. Sporadic lines of graceful speech from a functional brain are not only likely, but inevitable. Any juggler of words will have serendipitous moments. Because of his commitment to the barren landscape that he believes he must paint, he might be trying to keep all flowers out of view. But a fortuitous vision of beauty is irresistible; and so the poet of dead words puts a tulip or two in his picture. How ‘tin wing in the wind’ came to be, however, is known only to the author of it. It might have, for all we know, taken days to compose.

PART II, ARTICLE II: THE SPIRITUAL CONDITION OF A POSTMODERN POET, SECTION III

What is missing from Two Ghazals by John Thompson? Answering this question, even partially, must yield more light about the poems than what the content can tell us, for something so near to absolute disorder is not subject to point-by-point analysis, nor does it deserve to be treated so deservingly. No one can tell what the poems mean because the poems reach no conclusion. The author does not make his poems make sense. “He raves; his words are loose as heaps of sand, and scattered wide from sense” (John Dryden.) Poems without aim are not meant to be meaningful. Lane quotes Thompson, the author of the poems, “My interest in the form lies in the freedom it allows—the escape from brief lyric unity.” Lane comments further down, “So many people say they don’t read poetry because they don’t understand it, or say that ‘modern’ poetry lacks something (meaning rhyme and meter.) What they really struggle with is the unpredictability of the modern poem.” Our struggle is not with unpredictability, though, but with unattractive aimlessness. Mr. Lane, moreover, is being overly generous when he says that people ‘struggle’ with poetry like Two Ghazals. They do not bother to stick around long enough to struggle with it, nor should they. When metrical beat and brief lyric unity are absent, there is no rhythm. If there is one essential element to poetry, it is rhythm. Without rhythm, poetry is in a death throe if it is not already dead. Provide symmetry and reason, which together, form cohesion, and the poet might draw some readers. He might get more attention, then, than occasional pretended notice.  

What is missing when brief lyric unity, rhyme, meter, and therefore, euphony, are absent? These elements are not only missing from Two Ghazals, but from present-day poetry generally. Without concision, or brevity; metrical beat, or meter; similarity of sound, or rhyme; songlike expression, or melody; congruous thought, or unity, there is not much left to be desired in a poem, nothing left to please the ear or inform the mind—nothing left, moreover, to be desired in literature. There is nothing left, then, but disconnected phrases that mean whatever the reader wants them to mean. Why do poets even bother to write abortions like Two Ghazals? They do it because it is the next natural regression in the downfall of literature. Why was cubism followed by surrealism and abstract expressionism instead of something easier to fathom? It is simply because the Western world was still going downhill; therefore distorted reality was followed by unreal art. Now that quality is no longer the criterion for success, a man bereft of talent can be called a great painter. Mark Rothko’s paintings can be bested by any toddler worth his salt; but his meritless canvases sell for millions. The impressionists would think us mad to like the paintings of Rothko; Victorian poets would think us mad to like Thompson’s Two Ghazals. If we like paintings that are just horizontal lines of paint on a canvas, or if we like pell-mell confusion palmed off as poetry, we might not be insane; but our saner forefathers might recommend, at least, the artists that we like to an asylum.              

In a book that I do not have, called Stilt Jack, Mr. Thompson explains what a Ghazal is. I don’t care what it is. I don’t expect it to mean anything because the poems underneath it don’t mean anything. The word does not exist in either Webster’s or Oxford’s. I’m not looking anywhere else. It may be a form of poetic expression; and Thompson’s Two Ghazals may be faithful examples of that expression. I don’t want to know any more about a Ghazal than that. To me, a Ghazal is just a word used as a title for something someone stupidly calls poetry. The title of that book, Stilt Jack, is telling, though not much. The postmodern poet often puts one word beside another to say something unique but unfathomable—something that is very likely to have never been said before. He likes to produce confusion through fusion. Meaning is not a criterion for him. This oddball practice is a postmodern poetry distinction. The words ‘Stilt’ and ‘Jack’ might never have been placed side by side before the right ‘poet’ came along. It might be true, now, until forever, that Mr. Thompson was the first person to put those two words beside each other. In his poems, one phrase is put behind another with no detectable concern for meaning. This is the postmodern poet revealing his spiritual condition to us. Since, to him, truth is relative, abstract verses preponderate. His glory is to acquire a distinctive voice through abstraction. To supply the same meaning to everyone would be old-fashioned. He would rather tell everyone something, no matter what it is, by saying nothing specific. Traditional elements of poetry are not needed for writing this kind of verse. Sense and beauty are hindrances to it. When Depeche is put before Mode to make the name of a band, it doesn’t matter so much that it is difficult to imagine a mode hurrying up. We know that the name signifies the members of a band, as well as the repertoire produced by that band, and this is definition enough. But the new poetry is not defined by anything. What’s more, Depeche Mode may be a pretty way of saying ‘hurried fashion.’ In any case, it’s poetic. Two Ghazals is not.