My my my. I found this in Absent recently, through someone's linkage, sorry I can't recall whose. Well worth a read if you've ever tried to ride ol' Poetry into the sunset. If ever you wanted to have hot hairy sex with a satyr, this piece is as close as you'll probably get. Hooraw.
1) Poetry invited you in earnest. Poetry sent you reams of sonnets, ballads, epics, soliloquies, each lingering on every word, drawing you out of yourself and in to another one, pulling you in, tempting you to hover over every syllable, first concealing and then revealing the whole of its nakedness from angry epiphany to epiphany. Poetry is very fuckable, and poetry wants badly to be fucked.
2) Poetry is tired of being confined by the society of those who are paid to do poetry. English professors, high-school English teachers, poetry librarians, and poets at writing workshops all do their best to define a canon of poetry. As paid lovers of poetry, they set a few of their close friends alongside the Bard, Goethe, and two or three multinational poets who are there to prove that they’ve done some homework. They publish in journals, and talk to middle-class, white students in the nation’s elite universities. These individuals, these self-made doyennes, who get paid to make love to poetry, nonetheless defy in their very institutional rigor the kind of open, unlaced escape that poetry has been trying to execute since at least Mallarmé. If they really loved poetry, they would be helping her do what she really wants to do, which is to remake society. Instead, they grow old and fat, drinking and smoking with a few of their contemporaries, rarely traveling, and never introducing her to new people. Poetry secretly hates them.
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