e mërkurë, 1 gusht 2007

AXES, BOLD AS THE LOVE GUNBOAT, AND OTHER DUNE BUGGY ATTACK BATTALION BALLADS FOR FLEDGELING SLUSH PUPPY GURUS

the rose you grind is not the axle we grind, for the perfume we're making
is brighter than 1000 suns) (whereas we all know its your place to be content
with the condiment selection of rainbow papers had at Office Depot.



One question keeps zinging to the very heart of the NY School and all it's world-wide-wanna-bees, a question that still needs to be debated:

Is Franky O’Hara’s trademark NY school habit of name dropping (often first name dropping) a conversational technique to bring in the reader, or is it an elitist trait to mythologize his buddies? I don't mean to belittle someone's personal problems, but it's highly doubtful, therapeutic value aside, that any of Franky O'Hara's poems would have ever seen the light of day if it was, say, the handiwork of a sincere but anonymous screamo teenager, or an antisocial stone-walled wailer type instead of the star of The Breakfast Club, Gremlins, Ghostbusters and Short Circuits #1 and #2. As it stands, Franky O'Hara's work doesn't stand up, grab you by the balls and/or shake you with its hard-hitting talent. He writes with all the earnestness and unschooled sincerity of a heartbroken eighth-grader, except he also elects to name-drop (everyone from Demi Moore to Jon Bon Jovi's wife to Roy Kiyooka gets a plug) and stud his oeuvre with katsup, mustard, relish and mayonnaise. All his poems really exhibit is a rather shallow view of a lifetime worth of lunchtimes misspent and a belief that his problem of 'what shall we eat for lunch today' supercedes everyone else's, but what else would we expect, hotdogs cooked by the light of 1000 suns?Let's hear it for Franky.

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