Painter versus poet: shut up, nobody wants to hear your poems

This piece stages a friendly title bout between two male artists of my generation, painter Adam Cullen and poet Ted Nielsen, and is adapted from a longer essay on 'grunge poetics'. While my chosen exemplars share a 'turn of the century' cultural moment, there is also a large disparity in their respective levels of success (hence one possible reading of the 'shut up, nobody wants to hear your poems!' title) . Though roughly the same age, Cullen is currently one of Australia's most collectable artists and Nielsen is considered in poetry circles to be an 'emerging' poet (in a potentially 'submerging' art form) . While I may fall sway to the 'glamour' of a famous painter, one of the central investigations remains a questioning of how poetry sits within the montage effect of placing both artists' work side by side, rather than, as the title suggests, simply squaring them off against each other.