I feel very lost as an artist in the common era. Who really has their own identity in a decade full of cover songs and remakes? It seems like the greatest art we find does nothing more than harken back to something already great and distort it enough to call it our own. I don't think it's wrong at all, some of my favorite songs are covers, some of my favorite art is based on classics, books movies, all of it. I love when distortion is used as a tool of innovation, but are we all just innovators? Where is our signature? Where are the artists?
Maybe that's why I'm a poet. It's the only place I can find something new. Surely, contemporary poetry is a mix of the romantic and the modern, it's small and slight but has bravado. But it's also Victorian. It's scientific. It reflects who we are, now. Maybe the confusion came somewhere around the time that historians decided to name an era "modern" as if the title could no longer be used in the present tense. Technically we are still "post" modern, but that era too, is gone. We've driven ourselves into a time where we literally cannot even name ourselves. We've become the mice. As long as you don't name it, there's nothing left but to feed it to the snake.
I need a name for myself. I find myself craving brotherhood among long deceased groups, men and women who knew how I felt and would have accepted casual conversation that actually meant something. Perhaps that's where our corruption as a society comes from. Without a name, without art of our own, what is left but politics and vice? I'll never be a religious person, but the moral deprivation of our society is sickening. How could we find any beauty left in the world. Centuries of artists have relied not on new beauty (for the most part) but on recreating and reinterpreting the same beautiful things. We've found ourselves recreating interpretations, and nothing anymore is our own. We hardly even create original thoughts.
We don't even need Big Brother or a natural disaster to destroy ourselves. This civilization is anything but. We are the disaster.
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