Aside from foolishness & silliness, wooden stanzas & awkward lines, frustrations & humiliations... isn't this the credo of the poet : not to bend?

In a nutshell, isn't the aim to show an example of Aristotle's argument, that poetry is superior to history, in that it gives life to universals and form to particulars? Doesn't the poet strive to encompass the All in the Small (as in, Rhode Island)? "My circuit is circumference." And how can poetry accomplish such, unless it's free from the demands and rewards of temporary and limited goods - willing to submit to nothing but its own inherent (mimetic or anti-mimetic) requirements?

In my way I've tried to keep clear of anything that would bend poetry toward usages other than this basic one of its own proper ends.

This alone, by itself, is the ultimate geste. The extraneous business - motivations, justifications, explanations - only dilute the force of this elementary strangeness, or wholeness - this unbending universality.

You heard it here first : the literary health of a culture depends on the fierce struggle of the best to get itself born - to disentangle itself from the surrounding Pretense & Bluffery-Puffery : the swamp-fog of the petty, the ephemeral, the mediocre, the ersatz, the cheap.

This struggle in part depends on the kind of literary democracy (secret ballot of time) I've been talking about. Art needs the freedom to be itself, not part of somebody's program, career, stand-up caterwaul, or buddy-system.

literary democracy. little poems speaking up for themselves, making their way on their own merits. the secret ballot.

the fascicles in Emily's cupboard.

Melville, Whitman, doing their thing, & to hell with the hucksters, the flash, professional gossip-mongers, moneygrubbers, slackers & hangers-on, dilettantes, hacks.

now there's community for you!