On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 7:34:57 PM UTC, Michael Pendragon wrote:
> Below is an essay addressing your work in a positive light. What do you think about the various points raised in it? Does it capture the essence of your art? If not, where does it go wrong?
>
> COLUMBUS, GA is the fastest-growing cultural center in the U.S. (dare one venture in the world?), and two of AAPC's most active members are the driving force behind it all. Will Dockery and George "Stink" Sulzbach are well known throughout Columbus for the street poetry, artwork, music concerts, "indie" publications, underground films and television shows; but their greatest impact on the art world is through the new poetic movement they've established -- Fragmentist Poetry.
>
> Fragmentist Poetry combines Imagist Poetry with Minimalism to create what they describe as a "montage" within their readers' minds. Fragmentism pares Imagism down to its barest essentials, i.e., to a series of memory fragments describing persons, places or things. Narrative is abandoned. Form is nonexistent. Mood, message, emotion, tone and theme are barely, if at all, present. English grammar and composition are irrelevant as language exists solely to convey the image fragments.
>
> Fragmentism concerns itself only with recording a series of thought-images in a stream of consciousness style. Fragmentism is based upon image association (much like word association wherein individual words have been replaced by two- and three-word descriptive passages):
>
> Bottle bled dry,
> Dogs lapping vomit.
> Coffee stained fingers,
> Fate constrained by stars.
>
> One reason that Fragmentist Poetry has taken the literary world by storm is that anyone can write it. No education (other than a fourth grade level vocabulary), philosophical insight, imagination or compositional skill is required. This is street poetry in its most literal incarnation. It is the voice of the common man (and woman), evoking images that everyone can relate to.
>
> Fragmentist criticism is equally minimalist, often comprising no more than a thimbleful of words ("Outdamnstanding," "One of your best," "Me likee likee," & so on). An in-depth critique seeks only to identify the topic -- as the topic and the poem are necessarily the same. And this, so the Fragmentists argue, is the point. A poem should not be a barrage of words and punctuation attesting to the poet's erudition and grammatical expertise. A poem is the images it evokes.
>
> And their argument finds strong support in the field of psychology, which maintains that our unconscious mind is non-verbal and therefore only able to communicate with us through dream symbolism, or imagery. In replicating the dream experience, the poet is directly addressing the non-verbal aspects of our psyche -- our sub-conscious and unconscious selves.
>
> Critics have long held that poetry is a dying art form; but that is because they seek for it only in its traditional outlets. The poetry of tomorrow will not be found in the academic journals, but at the truck stops, dive bars, hobo camps and homeless shelters.
>
> So let's all pour ourselves a glass of MD 20/20 and raise a toast to the visionary, literary trailblazers in our midst. Zorro!P

This is brilliant, Michael, and exquisitely captures the Fragmentist movement. We disagree with you, however, that "anyone can write it." Certainly, it is easy for those who speak and write that way during their everyday, downtrodden, illiterate lives. For the educated, well-spoken readers and writers, though, it is difficult to leave out both subjects and verbs in the lines. Perhaps writing the poem in proper English and then deleting all subjects and verbs would be helpful in mastering the style?

We believe that it started with a fly at a bar who thought that he could write and paint. Flies can't do that of course, but the fly stuck his feet in mud and said it was van Gogh. He burped out single words and called it Hemingway. He wrote drunken emails, mistakenly hit "enter" after a couple of words, and called it Poe. His fellow fly-overs in the dung pile bar copied the style and have not changed it in 30 years.

On Monday, September 11, 2023 at 7:15:21 AM UTC-4, NancyGene wrote:
> On Friday, November 15, 2019 at 7:34:57 PM UTC, Michael Pendragon wrote:
> > Below is an essay addressing your work in a positive light. What do you think about the various points raised in it? Does it capture the essence of your art? If not, where does it go wrong?
> >
> > COLUMBUS, GA is the fastest-growing cultural center in the U.S. (dare one venture in the world?), and two of AAPC's most active members are the driving force behind it all. Will Dockery and George "Stink" Sulzbach are well known throughout Columbus for the street poetry, artwork, music concerts, "indie" publications, underground films and television shows; but their greatest impact on the art world is through the new poetic movement they've established -- Fragmentist Poetry.
> >
> > Fragmentist Poetry combines Imagist Poetry with Minimalism to create what they describe as a "montage" within their readers' minds. Fragmentism pares Imagism down to its barest essentials, i.e., to a series of memory fragments describing persons, places or things. Narrative is abandoned. Form is nonexistent. Mood, message, emotion, tone and theme are barely, if at all, present. English grammar and composition are irrelevant as language exists solely to convey the image fragments.
> >
> > Fragmentism concerns itself only with recording a series of thought-images in a stream of consciousness style. Fragmentism is based upon image association (much like word association wherein individual words have been replaced by two- and three-word descriptive passages):
> >
> > Bottle bled dry,
> > Dogs lapping vomit.
> > Coffee stained fingers,
> > Fate constrained by stars.
> >
> > One reason that Fragmentist Poetry has taken the literary world by storm is that anyone can write it. No education (other than a fourth grade level vocabulary), philosophical insight, imagination or compositional skill is required. This is street poetry in its most literal incarnation. It is the voice of the common man (and woman), evoking images that everyone can relate to.
> >
> > Fragmentist criticism is equally minimalist, often comprising no more than a thimbleful of words ("Outdamnstanding," "One of your best," "Me likee likee," & so on). An in-depth critique seeks only to identify the topic -- as the topic and the poem are necessarily the same. And this, so the Fragmentists argue, is the point. A poem should not be a barrage of words and punctuation attesting to the poet's erudition and grammatical expertise. A poem is the images it evokes.
> >
> > And their argument finds strong support in the field of psychology, which maintains that our unconscious mind is non-verbal and therefore only able to communicate with us through dream symbolism, or imagery. In replicating the dream experience, the poet is directly addressing the non-verbal aspects of our psyche -- our sub-conscious and unconscious selves.
> >
> > Critics have long held that poetry is a dying art form; but that is because they seek for it only in its traditional outlets. The poetry of tomorrow will not be found in the academic journals, but at the truck stops, dive bars, hobo camps and homeless shelters.
> >
> > So let's all pour ourselves a glass of MD 20/20 and raise a toast to the visionary, literary trailblazers in our midst. Zorro!P
> This is brilliant, Michael, and exquisitely captures the Fragmentist movement. We disagree with you, however, that "anyone can write it." Certainly, it is easy for those who speak and write that way during their everyday, downtrodden, illiterate lives. For the educated, well-spoken readers and writers, though, it is difficult to leave out both subjects and verbs in the lines. Perhaps writing the poem in proper English and then deleting all subjects and verbs would be helpful in mastering the style?
>

Thank you. I've expounded on Fragmentist poetry in at least one other thread, but was unable to turn it in an archive search.

You're correct, of course, in your observation that Fragmentist poetry is difficult for well-spoken writers to compose. The example I'd thrown together for this article is still much better written than anything our resident Fragmentists have churned out. In fact, I don't consider it an idle boast to say that *all* of my attempts to parody Will's poems have resulted in infinitely superior poems to the originals they were intended to mock. I that regard, I'm am sorry to admit that all of my efforts have been failures.

When a literate writer, like Twain, or Poe, or Whitcomb Riley writes in dialect, we instinctively know that it is far better expressed (and far more humorous) than its real life counterpart. One simply cannot fake "stupid."

And while writing in proper English, then deleting the subjects and verbs, might help, there is not way to replicate the poem's inherent illogic and inconsistencies. How can a rational mind come up with something as inane as having the morning sun burn away the fog to usher in the dawn?

> We believe that it started with a fly at a bar who thought that he could write and paint. Flies can't do that of course, but the fly stuck his feet in mud and said it was van Gogh. He burped out single words and called it Hemingway. He wrote drunken emails, mistakenly hit "enter" after a couple of words, and called it Poe. His fellow fly-overs in the dung pile bar copied the style and have not changed it in 30 years.
>

Yes, that bar fly appears to have been the Father of Fragmentism, although he may have modeled his poetry on that of an existing model as well. Fragmentism has only recently been identifies as an existing poetic movement, and will require years of research before its roots and influences can be ferreted out and documented.