The Cringe of Unearned Melodrama (ROUND 1)
scent of the day: Majmoschus, by Yaaseen
Majmoschus musk is a lot like Elkhaldi’s musk style (albeit less synthetic boosted)—yes, that style mixed with the sort of vanillic-citrus Shalimarness (here from benzoin and peach) as well as a musty-tropical creaminess (here from sandalwood and jasmine and oud) that one gets from Areej’s Chinese Oud 1. I need much more time with this. Only my second or third wear.
*Let's workshop this poem about a snobbish writer who mocks tacky poetry set against backdrops, center-justified dreck no less pathetic than Hallmark cards, only to wonder if he might be a joke himself
The Cringe of Unearned Melodrama
Poems of unironic Oh Bemoan center-justified against cupid cloudery that, for readers
not Hallmark jokes themselves, steals more heart than it lends— what long had him
despair for mankind now humbles him: “To whom am I a joke—to even them perhaps?”
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)
