Measured Extravagance

15 September 2003 - 10:02 a.m.

Haven't had time to read the whole thing yet, but Mark Halliday's essay on The Arrogance of Poetry looks as though it may fit in with several off-page conversations I've been having on the subject:

You and I, we read poems almost every day. We keep doing this even though most poems disappoint us. We are romantics � we keep expecting the marvelous poem that will change our lives. We try to read intelligently, and even skeptically, but we are ready to fall in love.

Sometimes fatigue or a journal stuffed with bad poems throws us into poetry-dismay, even poetry-disgust, but poetry soon wins us back. A good poem comes along that is damned appealing; it has charisma, it has a peculiar panache, it cuts a new path through experience, it expresses � or it is � a new truth, or new edge of truth. Life is suddenly undreary.

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