Guilty Pleasure

you know what I'm talking about. the stuff that we say is bad for you but you indulge, covet and love just the same. shit like bad movies, love stories told without irony, pulp fiction etc. etc. the list is endless as it is subjective. just recently the wonderful Eileen Tabios titled a post on her blog Everything Poetics and wrote a terrific defense of her love of reading romance novels.

I'd say that you can trust a writer when she/he confesses a love of what the Academy disdains. or what serious readers collectively spite. in other words, readers who take their reading seriously can, or should, admit to what is glossed over as trash. that includes poets in the Academy who are not serious readers but take their reading seriously, too.

for reading is the great pleasure in our lives as writers and as human beings, period. one question Lance Phillips asks his interviewees at the interview blog Here Comes Everybody what are the poet's non-literary reading habits. I'd go further and ask what types of trash do you like. People, US, National Enquirer? that is not a dis, for I dig trash, and adore even the sound of the word. we all have these surreptitious pleasures. we all scan the covers and even pick up these pubs at the checkout line.

I trust poets who admit to their liking of trash. of their guilty pleasures. tho, perhaps that's not quite how I should phrase it, since we should never feel guilty about pleasure. these thing nourish our poetry too. poetry should be, and is, about everything.

me? well, I, ahem, scan, and sometimes buy, but never, no, never subscribe, honest to god, to Weekly World News. its editors have consistently predicted the end of the world. I'm still waiting.