Well Bottom Blues

Forty-one years ago auteur Federico Fellini complained that the television remote control was breeding an impatient and distracted audience, constantly flipping through channels. Fast forward to the VCR and our new found ability to skip and rewind and pause, never entirely surrendering to another’s suggested narrative, the ancient fireside act of story sharing.

And now our attention span has been Tik-Tok’ed into oblivion by social media until it’s little snippets on the floor after we’ve trimmed the world to our cloistered taste, a product not out of art but of an algorithm, misspent mathematics. Coherence is the first casualtiy. Community grows narrow and disconnected In Real Life as the acronym goes.; what the tech bros call meat space as if the tangible world were just a grocery aisle with the fuckable on one side and the discount minions on the other.

I place my hope in poetry, that there are people not ready to party down with the Eloi but rather to linger with attention, to accept the suggestion of image or narrative in a way that requires them to participate and so make it their own, to enter the never ending story as old as Uruk. THEY’ve ruined cinema and the novel for the snippet hypnotized. Poetry is our last, best hope for our own salvation, if not of the mentally portion controlled. Still I post poems on Instagram, part evangelist and part wheat paste counter revolutionary.