A more general blog
Jim August 20th, 2008
I just finished reading a friend’s blog about slavery going on in the world. Apparently it is now bigger than in the heady days of the 1800s. It was sad, but my thought is, that human nature is not about to change very quickly. Of course, if it were, all the old poetry might really be as irrelevant as the poetry world seems to think. Indeed, poetry is probably in some sense, the closest thing we have to a pulse of the human conscience in a given age. I am thinking specifically of the outraged poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning regarding children in factories. I myself do not understand why the entrepreneurial urge so often comes down to victimizing others in order to achieve riches. One doesn’t have to go far to find it: a sweatshop in Los Angeles will fill the bill. Perhaps, like Browning, a new round of formal poetry is in order, a poetry that is not agnostic and self-indulgent, nauseatingly confessional and irrelevant, even to the poet. It is time for a counterrevolution.