Allen Ginsberg vs. the Internet

Allen Ginsberg sang the slow poetry of the technological age before its time. He took the time to wallow in the horrors of the banal that flit by us as fast as we can click thru. With Whitman as his muse, he turned our eyes from nature to our fractured nature, and held our gaze.

I don’t even especially like Ginsberg’s poetry. Give me Hopkins any day. But the torrent of measured fitfulness poured out as a fruitless libation, sterile poetry stank with death, demise, burrowing in little rat holes for faint hope; well there’s more there there than the internet, right? A goodly bit of the tubes piping bare flesh into bare hands and barren hearts, the rest amalgams of news, quizzes, pokes, wanton squealing over shiny things, and poor people mortgaging themselves on the next turn-key SEO keyword whitepaper build an audience dropship four hour solution (run on index cards, of all things). Well of course Ginsberg’s deadbeat doped out strung hipster buds and their very real suffering has more life than that. Life takes time. Poetry takes time. The tubes steal attention, the grist of living. Time bandits. Attention pirates. Design masquerading as art. The shocking parading as feeling. This pause pretending to be an ending.