There's a problem with blogs : they blur the distinction between poems, essays, & blab.

Why is this a problem? Because anything really interesting requires some discipline, some self-restraint.

Because writing should be subsumed by the disciplines of thought & silence.

Why? Because the most basic problems in the world can be traced to illiteracy, lack of access to education & freedom, the inability to communicate, powerlessness.

& if you, as a writer, feel no sense of responsibility toward the problems of the world, then I don't want to bother reading your superficial productions.

Not fair to blame poets for the sad state of education, culture, politics. . .

& a lot of it isn't even sad.

Critical pincers.

writing poems
criticism
fame : 2 sides of the brain & a side of hash with croutons. A canna Makitcohere, chef.

Poem : indefensible heavy breathing. Quite an achievement in its own realm but easily dismissed.

Heavy breathing + acute hearing.

Patience & fortitude.

Careful with those pincers on onionskin graph paper.

Fair to be aware of the heavy angels on watch overhead : the angels of education, culture, politics. . . Miltonic sibillance on granite. . . Brodsky with a hawk on his wrist.

Reading Closing of the American Mind. A great jeremiad. If he's right (& he is right about a lot of things), poets are "performing" in the midst of an era of extreme cultural & educational decadence & misdirection. The so-called mainstream/oppositional distinction is meaningless in this environment, a tendentious distraction : we no longer remember or comprehend the role of reading in the enlightenment of "souls" (as Bloom puts it) or the sustenance of American culture.