“Them!”

There are 96 pages of ‘poetry’ in Harry Josephine Giles collection Them! – 37 of those pages are totally unreadable. Not poetry at all. Linguistic masturbation and gimmickry. A significant number of the other 59 pages are more or less prose, and 8 are small black-and-white photographs. One piece contains a title and six words; another a title and seven words. On one page there is just a single word in a fancy border; on another just “[breathe out]” at the bottom of the page. Fact.

If the point of poetry is to communicate, how can it communicate when you can’t read what is being said because there’s a huge smudge running through a page? Or because the words are deliberately blurred? Or if there aren’t any real words at all? Or if one of the ‘poems’ is actually a flow chart? Unless the point of poetry is no longer to be read (on the page or aloud), no longer to act as a means of communication…

Alienating the reader is surely not the way to go.

In fact, the whole thing has made me so angry – especially in writing this – that I’m not even going to try and go beyond the nine pages I have read. It’s a pseudo-intellectual con-trick. How can intelligent people swallow this stuff – unless they believe that in doing so they are showing just how ‘intellectual’ they are…