Original Origin of the Originally Gifted

While checking out the web site of the Academy of American Poets, which had declared April as National Poetry Month, I signed up to receive the free "Poem-A-Day" via email.  I've received same every day for the last ten days, and without exception, they are all dreadful.  Most don't even qualify as poems in my book -- they are just prose set out in short lines to look like poems, but one actually was just a lengthy paragraph.

I can write stuff every bit as bad as that with one metaphor tied behind my back. 

Here is the problem.  Over the last hundred years, and especially the last 50 or so, art has gotten so avant garde that there is nothing much left to experiment with, but originality is so highly regarded that people with a creative streak (and maybe talent, or maybe not) strike out in bold new directions anyway, even though most of those directions require nothing in the way of formal or stylistic constraints. 

I once witnessed the performance of a "composition" where a guy crawled into a large cardboard carton (like a dishwasher would come in) on the stage, and once inside made strange sounds on the mouthpiece of a trombone. 

As for what Judith Viorst called "paintings of stripes and blobs," I won't even go there.

Undisciplined artistic freedom and too high a premium on originality open to the door to charlatans and persons, even if earnest, of little or no talent.  Today you can put anything on canvas and call it a painting, put any words on paper and call it a poem, and make any sort of noise and call it music. 

We could stop this if the viewers/listeners/readers of such works would stop nodding their heads and muttering, "Very interesting," and come right out and say, "This really sucks."  But your average consumers won't do that because they are living in abject terror that someone will dismiss them with the famous, "You know nothing about art," and call them Philistines.

Well, this Philistine is here to tell you that the Academy of American Poets is passing off as poetry actual works of crap.