Like a Man Gone Mad: Poems in a New Century

“Are There Poets Any More?”

10 “Are There Poets Any More?” I said there were, but are there? The student who asked if poets had vanished from the earth like Vikings had a point. Apart from all the workshop gangs, the blurb exchangers and the buddy-buddy cliques, what’s left? A name or two, and that’s the norm. Few giants. But then has Shakespeare had an equal earlier or since? I asked that very student to describe what poetry meant. “It’s putting your best words together with feelings in them.” Another point. It bested Eliot by stressing feelings, which Eliot the critic left unmentioned. A further point. If all the poetry the student read was word design or language flattened into sociology like yard goods, who could fault him? Someone suggested Whitman as a cure. I had my doubts since Whitman’s laundry lists of itemized 11 Americana glut the mind. Poems are meant to peak, not sprawl. And all the rhymesters now in vogue will matter less. They’ll end like old unhappy women matching miseries to gauge who’s been ignored or unappreciated most. Of those above the herd from Plymouth Rock to now, I favor eight. I won’t name names. Why start an argument? Unlike the vanished Vikings, poets will last as long as people last but never on demand and rarely in abundance. ...