03-30-2014, 06:27 AM
wasn't it Thomas Paine who said something like (I'm paraphrasing), one of the vices of people who seek to repress the freedom of expression of others is that they make prisoners of their own opinions, because they deny their own freedom for changing them.
and on the point about being shocking and controversial for the sake of being shocking and controversial, there seems nothing wrong with that, to me. The desensitized generation that history has spawned shouldn't be worn as a badge of honer but rather one of infancy and complete submission to a system that has beaten the human spirit down so far that one is apathetic to any idea outside the status quo (a neat trick: The over-codification of apathy
with regards to the people who produce art that, as people, I would find reprehensible, i would echo the statements before me, that a good poem is a good poem; but, I would add the caveat that if the person was personally offensive to me then I don't think I could view it in a non-contextual framework... for example, if my if my ex-girlfriend asked me to judge a poem by her new boyfriend that for everyone else was Joyce+1, I would rather jettison my copy of Ulysses and deny the merits of stream of consciousness poetry, than admit any talent on his part offense really is subjective, and being a white, unmolested, atheist, middle class male (= nihilist), poems about little baby black children being rapped and eaten in front of their parents sucking off God fucking a dildo, artfully done, is far less offensive than a poem by someone I know calling me a cunt
and on the point about being shocking and controversial for the sake of being shocking and controversial, there seems nothing wrong with that, to me. The desensitized generation that history has spawned shouldn't be worn as a badge of honer but rather one of infancy and complete submission to a system that has beaten the human spirit down so far that one is apathetic to any idea outside the status quo (a neat trick: The over-codification of apathy
with regards to the people who produce art that, as people, I would find reprehensible, i would echo the statements before me, that a good poem is a good poem; but, I would add the caveat that if the person was personally offensive to me then I don't think I could view it in a non-contextual framework... for example, if my if my ex-girlfriend asked me to judge a poem by her new boyfriend that for everyone else was Joyce+1, I would rather jettison my copy of Ulysses and deny the merits of stream of consciousness poetry, than admit any talent on his part
offense really is subjective, and being a white, unmolested, atheist, middle class male (= nihilist), poems about little baby black children being rapped and eaten in front of their parents sucking off God fucking a dildo, artfully done, is far less offensive than a poem by someone I know calling me a cunt