The Last Of The Mohicans, or The Last Empire

This I think qualifies as my first serious foray into the world of narrative poetry, although I still refuse to abandon form and structure.  That mostly comes from the source of this poem, which namely is the comments I received on my final poem submission (Daniela) to my creative writing workshop which I couldn't stand.  It read


 
"Julian, you continue to write as if the 20th C. pretty much never happened, as if you could be some reincarnation, perhaps, of Edgar Allen Poe.  It's frustrating, because apparently the class made no impression on you - also because you're not unskilled, you have a sense of how to manipulate language and meter.  You just don't seem to show any desire to speak as a contemporary man, or to break through to more challenging and complicated subject matter.  Oh well.  Maybe in time..."
Well of course, retard.  I honestly can't stand most of this so-called modern poetry, it seems like an absurdity to call it poetry when it's mostly anything but.  My belief is poetry should be intrinsically different than prose, otherwise there's no point in having either one, we could just have one big happy grouping and call it writing.  And just because I write in language more indicative of past centuries, it doesn't mean I'm not speaking as a contemporary man; no, I feel that the language of the past is not dead but has merely evolved into the language of the present, and as such it still carries with it many of the terms which are no longer in popular usage but still have meaning.  So, frustrated that the professor pretty much didn't understand a single thing I wrote nor did he ever ask me for my input into it as to perhaps help explain what I had tried to do, I decided I would write something narrative and telling, something that did something rather than just explore an emotion or a memory or a theme.  So naturally, the first idea I had went from the reincarnation bit, and I came up with the thought of having someone been born who was the last son of a dying race (hence, Mohicans), or the last son of a dying empire, who was destined to return to glory after it's fall at the hands of lesser beings.  The whole thing became a metaphor for the sweeping in of all the "great" poets of this past century and the end of the previous one, and their mockery of the art they had inherited from a long tradition of great men.  I think at this point it should all be fairly obvious without naming names who and what is meant, and I felt slightly better after I had written it, for as frequently happens for me, it became a cathartic experience.  And it was modestly lengthy for me, which immediately got me to thinking about writing my great pseudo-epic I had been planning on getting around to, which after a short break to write Malfeasance, I began immediately; the fruit of that labor was to become Desdemona.  But that's a story for a different day.
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