Poetry is Not The Final Girl: An Introduction

I guess I’m obligated to say happy (happy?) National Poetry Month but let’s be real, this April is going to be kind of a rough one. It’s been a shitty year for poetry, and poetry-related spaces and poetry-related people, and every time I think about it I truly feel like my head just weighs like thirty-five pounds, and every time I read a poem I’m always just like, damn I’ve put so many poems into my body during the course of my whole life but none of them seem to be doing anything for me at all, and whenever I fall asleep and try to take a tiny baby-sized nap, and get all like thank fucking god finally, I wake up ten minutes later with stray tissues stuck to my sweaty body, having had some bizarre dream about being interviewed for a corporate job by some elder poet who I mortally offended 5 years ago in my Segue intro, or some other awful dream about the first poet I fucked and who now hates me, only he’s also comforting me in a parking lot because I dropped my computer in a pool at some really bad bad book release party, and let’s face it I can’t really speak to anything about poetry any more, so I have no idea why they asked me to do this, cause really, truly, all I know from my "experience" or whatever is that it has been TOTAL HORROR.

It’s not all sunshine and rainbows at Camp Crystal Lake, okay?

I mean the truth is that poetry is not anything really that morally superior or good or exciting, it’s like not even as good as the green frosting on a CVS cupcake that could maybe redeem itself because it tastes 0.5% like a jolly rancher, and it’s not really like ice cream or soft serve where you can experience a beautifully unexpected milky reality located on another existential plane and it’s not even as good as the kind of sugar free lollipop you suck on while you’re quitting smoking where you can taste that deliciously bitter aspartame when you wash it down with coke. Sometimes I think poetry basically has no substance and is nothing but a collection of really good waifish looks brought to you by wet n wild eyeliner, lipsmackers dr pepper chapstick, aveeno positively radiant intensive night cream, diorshow mascara, and a shitload of germs, more specifically mono. Like that’s all it is, really, TOTAL HORROR.

So actually, sorry not sorry but I kind of decided that this month we are going to totally throw the actual poetry out the window and instead feel the DEEP MORTALITY of whatever kind of aesthetic object people fantasize about when they think about poetry (some kind of winged immortal craft? idk) descending upon us like the weight of the sun crashing into the earth. This is TOTAL REVENGE.

This month we are going to throw out rigor, gravitas, continuity, line breaks, rhyme and above all, poetry related poetic anything. This month we are going to celebrate waste, excess, cliché, genre, nihilism, murder, blood and violence related violent everything.

Because seriously, fuck poetry this month. Watch a horror movie instead. I’ve interviewed a bunch of people who are going to tell you why. Watch this space for more talk with artists who want to nerd out about scary movies and apocaplyse, because it’ll be way more fun and let’s just face it: Poetry is not the Final Girl. We killed the utopic Teen Dream. So let’s just all deal with it.

xoxo,
trisha