Todd Heldt published a poem with Ekphrastic Review. He was angry that we posted excerpts of it here, so he filed a DMCA complaint. It is extremely funny that someone who stole hundreds of dollars from a 12-year-old girl’s medical charity is trying to say we stole his pretentious poetry.
Below is a critique of Todd’s poem, which is a fair defense against a DMCA complaint.
The Opposite of Antipodes
by Todd “I stole money from a little girl but you should feel bad for me because I have tender little sensitive feelings” Heldt
I buy the poet’s book because
he is dating one of my exes
and hope he will take her out
to the café with the proceeds,
because I want her to get out more.
That is not a poem. That is a restraining order waiting to happen.
We drink tequila and rewrite
the entire book as its opposite,
so where it says, “You have no faith
in certainty,” we pen, I have
no doubt about ambiguity.
“A sound too deep for peacocks,”
becomes baby blue for blind turkeys,
Todd, you’re not deconstructing language; you’re playing Mad Libs after four shots and you think it’s philosophy.
figuring it all means pretty much
the same, though we cannot pinpoint
the antonym of antipodes
or what happened to words
to make them so pointless.
This is the poetic equivalent of “lol whatever” written in a self-pitying whimper that wants to sound like existential despair. I assume Todd is Gen X because his entire oeuvre drips of that self-indulgent verbosity that goes away the minute you have your first real responsibility.
But maybe her poet knows
what I do not about words.
They are useless glue and cannot fix
two people when they are broken,
and when they had the talk in which
they examined each other’s exes,
he only nodded in silence when she
told him I was good until I wasn’t,
or I was never good, or always good,
but bricks are hard when they fall
out of the sky for no reason.
Or she laughed, shook her head,
and told him I was the easy one.
The title of Todd’s novel is literally Jukebox Loser: An Owner’s Manual For Idiot Desires and this poem is the appendix nobody asked for. Todd is still out here mytho-biographing his way through the same three exes.
This isn’t poetry. This is therapy notes he formatted with line breaks because prose is for civilians. He took every flaw visible in his self-fellating interview (the pretentious name-drops, the trying-too-hard metaphors, the “I’m hilarious but also wounded” schtick) and distilled it into 40 lines of pure “please validate my emotional damage while I humblebrag about how unreadable I am.”