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A Truth in art is that whose contradictory is also true. - Oscar Wilde
The technique of antipoetry is to rewrite a poem as it's opposite, for example, using antonyms, antitheses, inverted rhyming schemes and rhythms.
Poetic licence should be applied. The poet may want to be sympathetic to the original theme or reject it entirely. The poet will most likely be in dialogue with the original. The purpose and effect is not simple parody. It provides a discipline for scholarship while producing poetry. The resulting poem can be cut up, rearranged and selected from, to make other texts. The discipline teaches skills that can be extended to any other writing that is not directly antipoetry. Antipoetry blends reading and writing into one. Writer becomes reader and reader becomes writer.
It enables the poet to overcome both their own ego by self-effacing submission to others' work as well as the popular ideology of romanticism and modernism that obliges the poet to be a seminal creative demigod, the sperm, egg and womb of a great work. It provides a way out of the autochthonous, autoerogenous, self flagellating mania of a solipsistic cell, into society, ethics, love and war. It's practice enables the poet to experience the pleasure of reading and writing poetry at the same time, without being inadequate to impossible tasks. It shrugs off the burden of genius. Antipoetry is a rejection of the ridiculous and pompous impossibility of purely inspired originality. Antipoetry allows the humility of respecting admirable poetry and gives the ability to apply effort to produce good work. Antipoetry provides an overt and explicit way of acknowledging that all language, and all poetry, is influenced by and in dialogue with what has previously been written and spoken.
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