Conceptual Poetry

by Elmo Acadork, Ph.D.

“Funny” is what “funny” does but to be a comedian is not allowable in footnotes or in too many titles of dissertations or in poems that are going to pass the test of “poems” if you know what I mean. The comic error is the toenail of tragedy, to be cut off before the run through history. Conceptual poetry is the idea of poetry, the talk around, the talk about, the explicit explication of poetry, as the ears are dragged off the muse and her tongue cut out if she tells too many jokes. After all only the devil laughs, not God, has Jesus ever laughed? But we’re talking about conceptual poetry which is the savior of mankind and certainly not to be lost in Cinderella’s slipper but to be talked about for all time, library bound, conference attended, divine fodder for the Modern Library Association and all the ass-heads who attend and corporate brains who back them.

Conceptual poetry is the idea of poetry which is a thousand times more important and relevant and astigmatic than poetry itself. Conceptual poetry is the new movement, the main movement that extends the idea of poetry beyond where poetry can never be since poetry is passée: we’re in the post-poetry era, dear apoplectic friend. Conceptual poetry is here to stay and take over the stinking corpse of poetry as we carry it decomposing to the grave. Only the idea is left, the talking about, the writing about, the publishing about, the books about, the employment that comes from the idea we have about, the conception of it: that dead thing that dared to laugh in the middle of my seminar on the textual subtext on the deconstruction of post past modern extrusions of 17th Century funereal verse.

/ 22Sep2011 / Elmo Acadork, Ph.D.

Dr. Acadork has been published in Exquisite Corpse. He is presently working at Spamdia Corporation in Albuquerque . . .