Death of the printed word

by zenchild

Posted to Utterances on 2001-01-23 16:36:00

I am a senior English/Theatre major at Dakota Wesleyan University. As such, I have been repeatedly told of the serious lack of any kind of literary movement of any substance by members of this generation. There simply is no audience in this day of television and music videos and short attention spans.

I think they’re wrong.

I think there’s a lot of talent out there that is just looking for a place to speak out. I think that poetry, far from being a dead tool of the English language, is a vibrant and vital tool, more relevant to us now than ever before because we can stand on the shoulders of giants like Eliot, Snyder or Ginsberg and use as inspiration those who have been inspired by the generation before and so on into eternity. We have a rich panorama of talent at our back, begging for this age to give voice to our own movement.

We are not the Lost Generation or the Beat Generation or that horrible Generation X label that some ad executive thought up one day and sold a sh!tload of merchandise with. We are whatever we want to be and we have a voice that needs to be heard.

Levi, is there some way a forum for the sharing of poetry written by anyone at all to be included in litkicks, the preeminent beat site? I think there’s a lot of untapped talent out there looking for a place to post their work, just for the feedback of others like them. If not, is there a place like this somewhere? A Gallery Six of the internet for this Net Generation to cyber-gather in a 24 hr poetry reading?

We need this. We’re not the mindless soulless nintendo automatons the politically correct incharges would have us believe. Let’s prove them wrong.

I remain

zenchild

The Literary Kicks message boards were active from 2001 to 2004.