[Newspoetry] Smooth Operators

[DL Emerick]

Smooth Operators:

In Raw World of Sex Movies, High Definition Could Be a View Too Real

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/business/media/22porn.html?pagewanted=2
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/22/business/media/22porn.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&
th&emc=th> &_r=1&th&emc=th

As if Playboy long ago had not learned to hustle airbrushed babes

 

If the philosophy of mathematics teaches art a lesson,

It might be this: any real world is jagged and rough,

Hence, art is smoothing when it becomes popular,

We learn to accept some new form as smooth.

 

The Golden Mean was a way to smooth distance,

To put things into a proportionate perspective,

in a fake window of opportunity to see a world.

 

Unpopular art, new art, speaks edgily, in rough tones,

Showing us how things are never quite harmonious.

 

You want to make new art?  Make it in the rough.

Make its lines stand out where none ever stood before,

To smooth the edges of existence in vanishing paints.

 

A poem is rough, when it has a new form,

One that is uneven, unsteady, drunken Dionysian,

Coming from a novel principle of smoothness -

One that fines ever refined applications,

As art manufactures an industry of imitation,

Where all can write a limerick, for instance,

Or trot out iambic pentameter on demand,

Even an impersonal computer could do it -

Though over-hyped as a personal computer:

It's all the laws of numbers, computing,

All the laws that we know how to practice,

So repetitiously proud are we, being boring,

For foolish pride lies in showing mastery of machines,

While no true artist ever yet yielded to a formula.

 

If I could explain what it is, I'd be killing it,

T put it in a package, a box to be buried,

With all the masses cheering me to my grave.

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