Nicholas Jones16 Feb 2007

What's all this about flow? I'm not an MC trying to win one of those rap battles (I'm way too white and middle class, for a start?). Who says poetry has to flow? Well maybe Keats did, but maybe he was wrong. Maybe it should stutter from line to line like our minds, my mind flows but it flows all sorts of crap over me, to create order is to lie, to tell stories is to tell lies, if I'm going to attempt to articulate the process of living inside my own head then there has to be some chaos. This is what Eliot and Pound did for us, they showed that artistic fragmentation is necessary to meaningful discuss a fragmented culture in a fragmented world. So fine, say it's a bad poem, that's ok, but don't say it's bad because there's no flow.