Do Poets Matter? by Robert Bové. [by way of the Texas Mercury] Yet another article in a long line of question-titled poetry pieces. Epstein, Gioia, Bové.
Exiling poets usually happens in dictatorships, such as Plato’s Republic and its spiritual descendants, Rome and the USSR.
No great writer is...um...something or other.
Then something Yeats said, in “On his being asked to write a war poem...” I think it was called: “I think it times like these a poets mouth be silent for he has not...” Durn, I used to be able to quote that verbatim.
Billy Collins’s remark was rather vapid, huh? But our (US) annual Poets Laureate are chosen to recognize their current body of work and to give them a stipend while they do light public-relations work, and are not there to write occasional poetry, as I think the Brit’s lifetime Laureates are.
A former US PL, Robert Pinsky who went to Rutgers (like I did) and Stanford (like I wanted to—I think he studied under Yvor Winters—wow!) used his position to push a project where everyone would be taped reciting some lines of poetry they liked. Or was that someone else?
The truth is, poets are too busy figuring out how words work to figure out how actual people work. (There was an essay on this somewhere in some literary journal, um, “Rhyming Action” in (some state) Journal, by some poet turned write whose name I will put here when I don’t have brain-freeze) This is not necessarily a bad thing. Have you read activist poetry? Really, truly, it sucks. But reading it is much easier than having to try to sit through it. It is only by dint of their craft that, say, Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones) and Adrienne Rich are tolerable.
(Baraka by the way hates rap. Just a little factoid I gathered from his reading at Poetry and the Public Sphere some years ago, but never wrote down nor thought to write down until I got a blog. Anyway, now that I’m more educated in rap, I think what he objected to was the hip hop culture—“thuggism”—or the lack of activism in it—“unless we make revolution.”)
1:26:55 AM 
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