In the old romance movies, women could not make up their minds in love, and the gallant men who loved them carried on calmly until they did. Chaos was a female weakness to be overcome by male sacrifice and stoicism.
Today, we laugh at this old notion, and think more along the lines that chaos or indecision lies more with the male gender, and, secondly, all kinds of chaos in general is actually the true way of things.
Romance movies haven’t changed that much, romance being what it is.
But a lot of people will still say that chaos is life, not art. A chaotic poem is boring, even though chaotic life may be thrilling.
The poets, however, like most intellectuals, are not really worried about chaos. Chaos is now kind of cool. The intellectuals have accepted it.
What is not cool in the eyes of the poets and the intellectuals is modern life’s unthinking bad taste. Intellectuals are consumed with how much society sucks.
Chaos? Death? Who cares about that. The real tragedy of life? Fast food.
We see these ideas expressed in this Round One West Bracket contest between the poets Kevin Young and Meredith Hasemann.
I want to be doused in cheese and fried.
Kevin Young is having great fun here, and the line is delightful. And behind it all, we hear the criticism of the “fast food” way of life, as if a McDonald’s cheeseburger was, in fact, the end of civilization.
Hasemann complains similarly. The ways and manners and devices of mankind encroach upon the freedom of nature:
The female cuckoo bird does not settle down with a mate. Now we make her come out of a clock.
So we want the female to be free.
To eat men.
Fried in cheese.
This should be an interesting contest.
