me, sort of outbursting

Poetry should not consist of cyber Tupperware parties, where "how wonderful" resounds amid clinking teacups of dubious discernment. Nor should poetry consist of jazzy, aesthetically immune readings in front of a microphone. Nor should poetry that is not wondrous poetry be published by editors of small and large presses.

I'm just not that interested.

But I will be patient with poems of a certain character -- those that at least remember traces of highest sensibility. Poems that have as their background the informing power of Lorca, Pavese, Milosz, Szymborska, Tranströmer, the young Kaminsky. Poems that are groping toward exemplary criteria: written art as a circumstance of the extraordinary.

I simply don't "get" poems that are indifferent to the aesthetic imperative. To that mode of saying in which craft and consciousness move within an environment of dark beauty and astonishing metaphor.

For me, poetry is at its best as a reaction to the mystery of phenomena, the eyes of others, the dreams of memory, and the implausible fact of being.


Outburst concluded.