Notes Toward & So On (7 : Interlude/Apologia)

I will keep this short, promise. #6, I know, was too long - left me feeling dulled, wondering what's the point.

So what is the point? The point is to reflect on the background of what is being presented as poetry. The background consists of dense, radiant, intricate poems. It also consists of the theory or theories of poetry with which people have tried to explain their understanding of it.

In this way, both the poet and the reader might gain some salutary distance from the ordinary noise & jostling of the literary herd. (I mean the place where books are skimmed & reviewed with quick but meaningless labels; where poetry is treated as a form of crowd control or lite entertainment; etc.)

& why take such a lonely and misanthropic and anti-social path?

Because it's not really that. It's the path of love of poems in all their depth, obscurity and radiance.

The background helps provide that. It helps one recognize characteristics of literary language which are overlooked or dismissed by current theoretical jargon-spinners. & so to make a place for something serious, outside the grounds of the po-biz carnival. The specific gravity of the poem & the life.