I found some of my old work that I had done in Illustrator and salvaged bits and pieces of it. I'll spare the details but the result was "You Can't Punish The Sane". I'm pretty proud of the work, to be honest. I've always thought that it would be nice to visually represent The Keeper and The Reaper as flesh-and-blood beings. I may not be the best model in the world but I think I got the job done fairly well.

As is my custom, I browsed through other peoples Visual Poetry after submitting my own. The majority of it was mundane or cliche but there were several works that made it into my "Originality In Poetry" collection and I plan on studying them later.
Now, I really hate to appear to be attacking a single style of art but it seems that there really isn't a way around it. I knew that the life-wrenching vines of Anime and Manga were far-reaching, so I don't know why I was really all that shocked to see more of its victims in Visual Art.
I mean, poetry isn't perfect; it has pretty standardized cliches and tends to drone on and on about suicide, death, flowers, or tragedy of some sort. I had assumed that the faults of poetry dwindled down from its cliches, so you can imagine my surprise when I saw a generic, gushy poem pasted over an even more generic anime character of some sort. It's getting harder and harder to remain objective about this topic, as my respect for manga and anime as an art form are being overburdened. Despite the mediocre and generic poetry that filled my screen, I continued to browse for unique works that expressed talent. That's when I was met with what I would consider to be the afterbirth of generic poetry. It's bad enough to see crappy poems on uncreative backgrounds but the sight I was met with may very well have sparked a brief lapse of sanity.
Up until this point, shitty poetry had its rules. It ended in either suicide, burning, freezing, heartbreak, murder, or some form of betrayal. Though they droned on for a while, they eventually ended and you could READ the damn things.
I saw a pictures of a stereotypical asian landscape. Mountains, lotus flowers, etc. with Kanji (Asian lettering that's become a hit with NON-Asians that obsess over Asian culture) and a bad translation in the description of the "artwork".

I know I'm probably going to come across as a douchebag for saying all this, but the point I'm trying to make is that the majority of creative artwork is getting drowned by people who slap some plagiarized material together, take it into photoshop, post it, and call it art.