Richard Siken's "Crush"

Recently, one of your knock-kneed readers here at this blog suggested I read the book "Crush," by "poet" Richard Siken.

I'm not surprised. This is exactly the sort of existential claptrap I expect so-called fans of what passes for American "poetry" these days to fawn over, mouths agape and drooling slightly at a man who can list more things than any other man could even dream. To even begin to contemplate that the poetic world could be expected to move on the idea of things alone - fiddle faddle.

Walt Whitman and all his buggery are to blame, perhaps, but that raving lunatic Eliot is also culpable for American poets' obsession with objects and nonsense. They did it first, dear Siken, and even though they did it better than you, they should have never even picked up a pen to begin with. The doctors who delivered them screaming from their mothers' wombs should be damned to Hell for their irreconcilable sin of dooming American poetry to its current glut of litany and logorrhea.

"Crush" is a disaster of a book, but I'm not surprised at the accolades it has received, nor its cult following of young poet dimwits who revere its facade of imagery as actual mastery of the craft. If there's anything positive to be gained from this miserable piece of filth, Siken's book can be looked at as the funeral knell for American poetry, the last terrible sign that signals the death of everything wrong with verse this side of the Atlantic. There is a gleam of sunshine beyond this rotting heap.

RATING: 6% (The book uses a nice paper stock)

(Yes, it's common knowledge that my own poetry manuscript, "At The Birdhouse Singing," was turned down by the Yale Younger for decades, but as a highly educated academic I can separate supposed personal poetic bias from my career as a revered critic. Thank you)