The Hatred of Poetry

You can hate contemporary poetry—in any era—as much as you want for failing to realize the fantasy of universality, but the haters should stop pretending any poem ever successfully spoke for everyone.

Thus the poet is a tragic figure. The poem is always a record of failure.

these were the first movies I’d ever seen in a theater without the emotional buffer of my family—I felt that other worlds were possible, felt all my senses had been reset and sharpened

Warhol is the Whitman of the actual: “A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.”

If he is forced to restrain you, he will have to report that he is forced to restrain you. It is this simple: Resistance will only make matters more difficult. Any resistance will only make matters worse. By law, I will have to restrain you. His tone suggests that you should try to understand the difficulty in which he finds himself. This is further disorienting. I am fine! Can’t you see that! You climb into the ambulance unassisted.

Or one begins asking oneself that same question differently. Am I dead? Though this question at no time explicitly translates into Should I be dead, eventually the suicide hotline is called. You are, as usual, watching television, the eight-o’clock movie, when a number flashes on the screen: I-800-SUICIDE. You dial the number. Do you feel like killing yourself? the man on the other end of the receiver asks. You tell him, I feel like I am already dead. When he makes no response you add, I am in death’s position. He finally says, Don’t believe what you are thinking and feeling. Then he asks, Where do you live?

This is why so many cultural critics, with a kind of macabre glee, proclaim “the death of poetry” every few years: Our imaginative faculties, we fear, have atrophied; the commercialization of language seems complete.

“I tended to find lines of poetry beautiful only when I encountered them quoted in prose, in the essays my professors had assigned in college, where the line breaks were replaced with slashes, so that what was communicated was less a particular poem than the echo of poetic possibility.”

At the end of the defense, instead of supplying examples of great poems, Sidney just pities people who “cannot hear the planet-like music of poetry.” (I, too, can’t hear it.)