Perhaps the vast majority of written verse today ought to be viewed as self-expressive therapy, and quietly treated not as art, but as an important and effective kind of self-administered education that can bring order to the situationally confused or the chronically puzzled. If verse is to survive, perhaps this is where and how it should do so: as a minor but useful cultural instrument for ameliorating human stupidity and the violence that springs from it. At its best, verse therapy will refine a few rough or confused minds. At very least, it will keep some savage beasts, perhaps temporarily, from maiming the people around them. As we used to say in jail, reflection is good, in and of itself, if only because it slows people down.

Yet in spite of everything I’ve said here about the state of poetry, I have an overpowering instinct that when I stopped publishing verse and thumbed my nose at the Biz, I gave up most of my access points to the essential life business that is poetry. That being so, there are a couple of questions left hanging, and which I need to answer: Is there anything genuine and valuable in the verse Biz? Are there substitutes for one who gives it up? Are there alternatives?

The short answers seem to be:

1. Yes;
2. sure, but they don’t work very efficiently, and for me they don’t bring the same pleasures;
3. no, I can’t think of any, but maybe you can.

1. I’ll concede this much to the Biz: it allows a few talented people to work with language at a complex level without constantly scrambling for subsistence, or being bullied into obsessing over financial investments the way most of us are encouraged to. I’m thinking not just about the few pissy grants the government doles out to working poets, but about our university literature departments, which is where many poets end up, God help them. The benefits society receives from having such people around may seem out of measure with the fiscal costs incurred, but there’s no reason that ought to bother us. The poet/professors are very small fish, whether they’re the marginalized grant-accepting ones or the tenured academy poets. Their pond is small and drying up, and if we’re serious about societal waste, we’d do better to examine the Armed Forces, Parliament, or the medical system. If we think its time to pry a few remora off society’s fat haunches, that’s where the big ones are to be found. We ought to praise these poets for what they are doing: prying bits of rust from the language we use. Or at least, that’s what they’re supposed to be doing.

2. For good or bad, poets form communities. They do it for mutual support, whether the support involves editing, ego boosting, or simply companionship. No other writers seem capable of doing this. It reveals something that the last 50 years of lyric poetry seemed determined to deny: that poetry is at root, a social activity, and that the choir, even it is only practicing for imaginary events, is more important than the individual poet whining about his or her outcast fate. And unless we’re addled enough by the sentimentalization of democracy to believe that singing in the shower makes us musicians and poets, (which I don’t) those of us who eschew the community aspect of poetry give up both a basic responsibility and a compositional comfort.