When I first heard about snuff poetry readings, I was loudly skeptical. People have been trying to make poetry matter again, ever since it abandoned lyric to singer-songwriters, and left form to the good folks at Hallmark — who’ve since abandoned it — but the rumors and manifestos always come to nothing.

I pronounced the idea “morally suspect” because, let’s be honest, anything new or popular is bound to be.

From my point of view, the only Literary form worth pursuing is the neo-Tatlerian essay. Without that, we are nothing.

Still, I gave it a try, because I was stuck in a boarding lounge and I’d run out of other things to check on my phone. It was that or learn Armenian. Well, Byron learned Armenian and look what happened to him.

Search, login, and boom: here’s this guy trying to do rap, spoken word, shuffle dance sonnets, and it’s boring. I think I forgot to specify language, because he was talking in Greek or something. Anyway, I hit the electric shock button.

The boring guy droned along, so my microvote must not have amounted to much. I reset for English and then hit the randomizer button again.

This time it was a woman doing strip sestinas, but her timing was all off. She was trying to take something off in each stanza, and that meant she had to stretch the stanza, keep repeating syllables, and it was still too fast to be interesting.

Not really worth zapping, though. I moved on.

I was too late to get the gist of the next thing, but I take it he was doing fire-eating while performing the poem, and had just been zapped as I was arriving. He gagged with the wand down his throat, I think, and I saw him drop to one knee. His arm dropped, the wand fell out, still burning, and rolled next to his pants.

I assume that they were nylon fiber, because they ignited rather quickly. I was expecting stage crew to step into the picture with fire extinguishers, but that wasn’t part of the rules, or the guy was alone. The varnish on the floor was clearly heating up and igniting, but the smoke soon got so thick that you couldn’t see anything.

Whoa.

That’s when I fully embraced the snuff poetry movement. This is serious art, I said out loud. I’d seen poets bomb on stage before — who hasn’t? — but I’d never seen one risk going up like the Sōryū.

Well, okay, there was the twit I remember from my college days, who was drinking Everclear and smoking and butchering a Bukowski rant piece. But somebody soaked him with a pitcher of beer, so it barely counts.

Since the fire-eater incident, I’ve been spending two or three hours a day listening to poetry, and letting the kilowatts fall where they may. I hadn’t realized there was such a vast, brave poetry community out there, and it changed my mind about some poetic forms.

I used to think of haiku as impressive, but now I see them as attempts to get off the stage without risking real meaning.

Ballads are brave. Balladeers have always been a special kind of badass, and on the snuff circuit, their practitioners take a lot of punishment. You can tell them, sometimes, by the involuntary twitches before they’ve even started.

I spent more than a week down the rabbit hole of coronach keening, both with the kora accompaniment, and the spoken word version with the hula hoops. I did a lot of zapping that week. But keening, done well, has real poetic power.

I tried to write some stuff myself, but never got something I could risk onstage.

And that’s the reason snuff poetry will soon rule the world. It sharpens the point that poetry, if it’s any good, should entertain the audience, and you’d better have practiced. You need to be on your A game, every single time. Especially if you get a big-enough audience to be potentially lethal.

There are no stuffy academics with their longwinded, self-aggrandizing, pointless poems with fancy names and fancier vocabulary. Or they’re not there very long.

Yes, I zap at the word liminal, every single time.

A poet friend zaps cerulean. And coruscating.

You also don’t have to listen to pretty little poems about birds and flowers, unless the poet has some amazing performance thing going on, as well. The guy who plays two Disston handsaws, a No. 7 and a No. 12, while doing expanded riffs based on Sara Teasdale poems is a stellar example. I never, ever reach for the zapper when he’s at work.

Some of my more Philistine friends chide me for not streaming much video anymore. Their art forms risk nothing, and the audience takes no responsibility.

Child stuff, I say.

Oh, I hear all their condescension; just like mine before I tried it. And the accusations of nihilism. One of my former professors, Philosophy and Proctology, thought he’d win hands down by insisting that the end result of snuff poetry is the death of all poets, that the subtext is that poets must die.

“Is that your idea of Truth?” he asked, the capitalized word clear in his pronunciation.

“Yes,” I said, thinking of Marlowe, Villon, and what should have been done to Pound. “Isn’t it yours?”

What folks like him aren’t realizing is that the snuff circuit has made poetry serious and relevant again, giving it the seriousness of an MMA beatdown in your own living room. Poetry can put your life on the line, if you’re willing to step up to the camera. It’s not wine-and-cheese circuit stuff anymore.

Poetry matters.

– Timons Esaias