“Imagine, if you will, a poem that incorporates the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the blowing up of the Kerch Bridge, Grindr, ketamine, The Purge, Lana Del Rey, the next three Covid variants, and the feeling you get when you can’t remember your Hulu password. Imagine that this poem— which also mysteriously contains all of recorded literature— is written in a form so splintered, so jumpy, but so eerily holistic that it resembles either a new branch of particle physics or a new religion: a new account, at any rate, of the relationships that underpin reality. Now imagine this poem making news, going viral, becoming the poem— hailed over here, reviled over there— such that everybody is obliged to react to it, and every poem yet unwritten is already, inevitably, altered by it. And now imagine that the author of this poem— the poet himself— is a haunted-looking commuter whom you half-recognize from the subway platform. You’re getting close to ‘The Waste Land’…” James Parker on the apocaplyptic vision of T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ one hundred years after its publication.
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