Rebecca Tamas - what bad poetry is like

[busker]

https://granta.com/two-poems-tamas/

the witch thinks about what it would be like to fuck the government
the government would be an octopus would it or no a giant squid
that huge cobalt industrial complex eye
how can anything be that big
how can basically a prawn swell and swell to these Cousteau proportions
you can’t see where its sex parts are you can only see the eye the huge
impossible eye much more sophisticated than an x-ray
which only sees bones this sees soul this sees sin this sees your GPS location


And so on it goes
Trying hard to be edgy, but all it gives off is the whiff of a gender studies departmental debate on electrical engineering
This is the sort of BS poetry that gets published. The question is, who buys it? And who sinks his money in it?

[CRNDLSM]

I just wanna know where the sex parts are

[busker]

I just wanna know where the sex parts are

You’d have to buy the book for that
Maybe that’s the scam - come buy dirty book, boy buys dirty book, gets bad poems

[TranquillityBase]

I read both poems.  You can't say she's not consistent.  It comes across to me as a kind of restrained (only slightly) automatic writing a la the Surrealists.  Just let the images pour out on the page as they come to you, with the slightest of threads holding them together (sometimes).  I'm not altogether repelled by it, to the point of labelling it "bad poetry", but it also seems like it's the easy way out (or in) for composing a poem.

I see the first one, which I read more closely, as almost a narration of a pornographic manga.  Her main focus seems to shock the reader, but the shocks grow monotonous after a short time.

[rowens]

The poet is sexually attractive and has a famous father. Her last name is Tamas, one of the Gunas. Guna means Thread. Ever changing. The witch is in with the nonhuman, the Government and its Technology is also nonhuman, but the witch seems sure. She lets me call her a witch. Is she smug in her craft, or proud in her tantra? The poet is sexually attractive, she was born in 1988.

Nature and Technology, are they compatible, being the same? Does Imagination become roaring raging Conservative Overlord; does the horned man of the green?

Which which is a witch?


The poet says this:

"I’ve been researching the Ancient Greek cult of Dionysus recently, and in doing so, have been thinking more and more about the importance of mystery and alterity in building a sense of solidarity and intimacy with the nonhuman world. Dionysus, the ‘hidden god’, seems to represent/allow an access to what is beyond the human that revivifies and transforms, a connection to the violent difference of the nonhuman that is electrifying. So much of our lives are spent in the carapace of the entirely human, whether in cities, or in a countryside shaped by agriculture. To witness radical difference, to recognise the agency of wild things, without idealising them, can restore to us the sense of living in a diverse and unpredictable universe. To me that is an immanent rather than a divine mystery, that allows us to feel a genuine joy in a connection to a wider life force that exists beyond our own limiting conceptions. That perhaps sounds a little sentimental too, but I’m not quite sure how else to put it into words!"



I, with more than a bit of the smug chaos she disdains, am certain how to put it into words. You can put anything into words.

---

I want to say that she is only published because she is attractive and has a famous father, not because I dismiss her, but because if I met her, I'd want to attract her through her hatred. For her to seethe in my poetry of Irreverence. That is the best. That is how I operate smoothly. Love burns longer through rage which is heavier and deeper on a carnal level than cutsie fruitsie wedding vows and apartment sharing. The most heinous divorces are corrupted by a love deferred.