For some time I've been interested in exploring the possibility of using the creative arts, particularly Poetry, as a tool to create a mentally excruciating experience for the reader—primarily because it is something I feel I could be good at.

While harrowing art experiences, particularly in the area of Poetry, have been with us for centuries, this is typified by a sense of relief in the audience once the piece has been viewed or executed in its entirety and is no longer being inflicted on them, as opposed to resulting in a sense of excruciating experience that lingers on in the audience members' minds long beyond the limits of the direct audiential experience of the "mere" piece—the piece qua the piece itself. Also, most excruciating art experiences with which the reader may already be familiar differ from the current endeavor in that the most pronounced such effects, virtually without exception, are unintentional.

Excruciationisticalisticisticist Art can be defined most simply as Art created in the pursuit of the Excruciationisticalisticisticist Ideal. The Excruciationisticalisticisticist Ideal is a work of art which is both universally compelling and uniformly mentally excruciating to all viewers (known in EXCRUCIATIONISTICALICISM as the kunstwerkopfer), regardless of cultural background or past experience. Such a work would necessarily play upon the kunstwerkopfer's very humanity.

To these ends, my first Excruciationisticalisticisticist poetry employs both doggerel, as in Ode To A Croaking Man and Ode To 'Ode To A Croaking Man', and more formal pieces, such as Verse Upon Bank Of America Holding My Checks And Angering My Cat.

EXCRUCIATIONISTICALICISM brings with it new poetic forms. The first of these that I have devised is the coppia vanitoso, a paired form in which a complete work is followed by a second complete work about the first. Additionally, a reliance on the repetition of discomfitting poetic devices such as capricious inconsistencies in scansion, needless mentions of food, and use of improvised (though no more than marginally incorrect) wordile constructs, has been used in an attempt to maximize the induced effect of the kunstwerkopfer metaphorically wanting "to claw his/her mind out with his/her own two hands."¹ Proponents have referred, jocularly, to EXCRUCIATIONISTICALICISM as the asshole cousin Dadaism wishes it didn't always have to invite to family dinners.

Experiments in creating an excruciating effect upon the kunstwerkopfer using Victorian and Elizabethan Poetic styles have not yielded noteworthy results as I am not well-acquainted enough with those genres to be facile in them, and this has kept such efforts firmly within the confines of Inexperientialisticalisticisticist Poetry, another aesthetic school of Poesy unearthed by your humble Poet, but hopefully soon to be reburied.

Conventional, nonexcruciationisticalisticisticistic poetic endeavors such as the epic work-in-progress Ode To A Curl-Up and the succinctly doleful My Lament have also been included on this site in the name of completism.

The current pieces represent only the first attempts at creating Excruciationisticalisticisticistic works. Surely the most excruciating poems are yet to come!