sigh-fucking-sigh

This was written a few weeks ago: 

So I've been awake for 37 hours. This is all because my Internet, which is usually as slow and excruciating as constipation*, has been running unusually fast. Last night, I didn't really do anything at all, anything that I remember anyway, but I did submit poems to two different "magazines". One of them is a normal, non-institutional journal. The other is my (admittedly-inherenetly-sucky) university's gallery magazine.

In doing this, I realized that I have a slight problem: I don't understand any modern poetry. Not any of it, not a single word. Off the top of my head, Gregory Corso's "Marriage" is the most recently-published poem that I understand, and I understand it completely. 

It was published sometime in the late fifties/early sixties and is really a great poem. I like it more than most anything I've ever read. In fact, I could have written it. This is not to say that I'm an excellent poem-writer**, though. It means that I (feel that I) understand the poem so deeply that it could have been my own personal experience that went into the poem. My "girlfriend" is also a phenomenal, better-than-me poet.

And it is my personal experience, almost. "Marriage" is (almost) the way I feel about marriage. I feel like this is all very obvious. Anyway:

Now, I can read poems in a journal and understand them, but my understanding is almost exactly the same: Okay, postmodernism, okay, okay, okay. Because, what the fuck, poems don't look like poems anymore! 

Yes, it's kind of dumb to argue that poems have to look like poems, but none of the poems I'm seeing in journals rhyme. 

* This is the shittiest simile I've ever written.

**This does say, though, that I am reluctant to call myself a "poet". Add that to my list of theoretically-correct self-descriptive adjectives that I shy away from.