Las Flores Rotas: Poetry

Feliks Jabłczyński, "Tańce nowoczesne (Modern dance) Pl.12" (1922)

In college, I was acquainted with a literature professor who published several books of contemporary poetry and could be considered successful by Vermont standards — there were at least forty cars parked outside his house once when he had a party. At first, I was curious to find out what poetry he wrote, but then a friend of mine told me that, among his works, there was a poem about drops of urine falling into the toilet during a bathroom break. And that spelled the end of my curiosity: I avoided the man like the plague ever since, fearing I would not be able to keep a straight face if I had to talk to him again.

So, here is the main problem with contemporary poetry. The free verse gives you the ultimate freedom of putting virtually any words together and making peculiar sentences that are essentially guaranteed to be unique. Moreover, with a large enough audience, such phrases will almost certainly mean something to somebody. But, by working this vein, the contemporary poets risk becoming the hypothetical monkey that hits the typewriter’s keys and, sooner or later, produces the exact text of Romeo and Juliet. The only catch is: to succeed in this, the monkey needs an astronomically large amount of time, and all the contemporary poet has is an average lifespan (often reduced by alcohol and drug abuse).

So, can drops of urine falling into the toilet be a metaphor for something significant and non-trivial? Hypothetically, yes. However, I am unable to come up with such an example. In fact, the more I thought about it back in college, the more convinced I became that the poet clung to this image for no other reason than not having come across it before.

In other words, the main problem of contemporary poetry is the unbridled temptation to talk about anything and anyhow without taking responsibility for the outcome. In the past, the constraints of rhyme and poetic feet forced the poets to craft their works carefully and make sure they make sense. But contemporary poetry is free to blurt out essentially anything, claiming it to be the new creative standard. However, this stops being an exercise in poetry and becomes one in sophism: an ancient Greek school of thought whose adepts believed that, as long as you could prove that a lie is a truth, it became one.

Danil Rudoy. Modern Poetry, 2026.

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