#358. Epistles from the New Fade

#358.

I just launched my fifth poem blog cycle, Epistles from the New Fade, continuing the web idylls I've been working on since 2007.  The concept is simple enough: to write a new poem as close to one a day as possible until I reach a hundred.  This will be the first time that I attempt each one to fit a single theme, which is the New Fade.

The New Fade, you ask?  It's a concept I've worked on for almost a decade (I've helpfully tagged in each of the previous four blogs, Terror of Knowing, We'll See, Fall In Their Place, and Modern Woe, poems that have "New Fade" in the title, though it's referenced in others as well, and obviously ones that are not publicly available, including the first one).

The idea is that we live in times that are in a constant state of flux, but the results are more a quagmire than a revelation, so that to understand it at all, and very few people do, you need to examine it in ways that might not seem obvious (but then, the critical eye is what I believe poetry is for).

Poetry itself is in a curious state.  It used to be huge.  It isn't anymore.  In many ways, poetry itself is a fascinating subject for the New Fade, since like almost everything else it's fallen victim to the strange mix of perfect socialism we enjoy that is nonetheless subject to some of the most insidious totalitarianism that history has ever known.  If you can understand that statement, you might understand the New Fade already.

But for everyone else, that's what I'll be trying to write about.