hmm...

...so contemporary poetry should be infused and reinvigorated with bile, spleen, satire, realism?

"The bitter fool"


I'm not so sure about that.

For me, the basic criterion is other than adopting a social, political or psychological attitude. Other than a necessarily sober presentation of phenomena and event (realism, I guess). In fact, the idea of a general shared attitude for poem making seems odd to me. Whatever those classic guys wrote about in Rome way back then was a reflection of their world. And even they strike me as squeezed down into a conventional form of soul -- too wrapped up in boring people, boring ideas, boring shit.

There happen to be a few good poets alive today, though I doubt the article writer would have much use for them. He's too caught up in poetry-as-commentary.

There happen to be a few good poets who write things of startlement. It's about language as a way of distilling the truly surreal or beautiful or unnerving from time and time's dream. The deepest stuff of life finds a way, through the rare poet, to make language a strange dance of being.

The remarkable and laudable poem is not the one that spits, grimaces, deflates, confronts; rather it is the one, in effect, that is a questioning of being.

Satire? How trite.