I raise you…

I’m seeing Potter’s poetic news weakly held and raising it with the famous essay of Gioia to the world….

I could quote a salient part, but prefer to let the pediatrician from Paterson doctor the words that will heal the nation:

My heart rouses
     thinking to bring you news
         of something
that concerns you
     and concerns many men. Look at
         what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
     despised poems.
         It is difficult
to get the news from poems
     yet men die miserably every day
         for lack
of what is found there.

Comments

  1. Lansing Deacon says

    Would the good doctor be William Carlos Williams?

  2. “Forgive me, Deacon, for I have obfuscated, it has been 12 stanzas since I last spoke clearly about a subject…”

    Yes, in fact, it is Dr. Williams. Sorry for being a dunderheaded blunderbuss.

    JOB

  3. Churchill says

    I’m sure there are some nasty poets. Watching the news is better for one’s mental health, and perhaps for the world.

  4. Jonathan Webb says

    One of my favorites. Wasn’t he also an abortionist. Correct me if I’m wrong.

  5. Jonathan Potter says

    I have to go to bed, so I can’t read the entire essay. Plus it more thoroughly inserts the probe up poetry’s arse, and there’s only so much I can take. But I did read the first two screens (pages?) and the end. His proposals for bringing poetry back out into the light of public life are sort of ho hum, but it does make me think of one person who has done the most to do that for poetry over the past decade — namely our good friend Garrison Keillor, with the Good Poems anthologies and The Writer’s Almanac. Hurray for GK, I say!

  6. Jonathan Webb says

    Lady Churchill, do you watch that car show with the three old guys?

    Did you ever watch Secret Agent? That was a great show.

    Do you belong to Mensa? Patrick McGoohan belonged to Mensa.

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