Collage Poetry is Bullshit

How many times have we heard that collage technique is the signature method of post-modernity? Let me translate: "I can’t think of a very good line, so I’m going to steal somebody else’s shit. Then I’m going to lionize my theft by thinking of it as post-modern. I’m going to recycle somebody else’s novel or poem or whatever 'discourse' and benight it under my Barthesian halo."

The whole “culture of belatedness” routine is a theoretical contrivance. All of the noise about the “death of the author” and the “death of literature” and the “death of the notion of originality” is a load of apocalyptic camel dung. These people remind me of those Fundamentalist stormtroopers prophesying the end of the world, only instead of being evangelical Christians, they are evangelizing the latest-greatest French post-whogivesafuck. Every generation of artists has had their faction that felt like they had arrived “too late” to produce work the way their predecessors did—and so had to find some new method. That’s fine, if it really produces a new method. Your computer’s cut-and-paste function ain't it.