Not to suggest that I had more than a vague instinct where the roots of poetry lay 35 years ago when began my pursuit of Pound, Williams, Olson and their poetic heirs as my teachers and as my working models, or that I’d uncovered much more 15 years later when I stopped publishing. It wasn’t that I didn’t believe in the sense of beauty that is lyric poetry’s purest energy, but that I was suspicious of the darkness that placed it in chiaroscuro. What I perceived around me wasn’t so much dark as muddy. It held no residue of high explosives, and it did not stream with human blood and body parts. It was fouled with cigarette butts and the paper and Styrofoam debris of mass-produced hamburgers and milkshakes. My instinct was that such a world requires a catalogue less private and idiosyncratic than Whitman’s body electric, and an emotional frame less prone to self-regard and sentimentality than Wilfred Owen’s pity. But I couldn’t seem to create either catalogue or frame, and neither could my fellow poets.

At this point, I have a question of my own: Did the distinction I made in the 1980s between poetry and verse cause me to lose touch with an essential element of a writer’s craft?

I had a lot of it right in that 1980s essay. Like Edmund in Shakespeare’s King Lear, I had seen the business. And, poetry is an essential mode of human thought. It holds the technical protocols of metaphor, which is human language’s most powerful but hardest-to-master instrument. Verse, on the other hand, is a temporary cultural expression of poetry, and one that has been in a state of cognitive arrest for nearly 80 years. It is now pragmatically obsolete except as an underutilized training tool for writers working still-viable genres, and its decay is a danger to the health of language because its diminished purpose is not widely or accurately recognized by those who ought to recognize it. It simply aggravates the general offense that verse is sometimes given an official dignity and grandeur that poets–outside of those war poets–have had no way of earning for it in 200 years.

Today it is hard for even the diehard partisans of verse to deny that the affective poetry of the late twentieth century lies in the products of popular culture created by commercial technologists, popular musicians, film-makers and videographers. Popular culture being what it is, they have used the tools of poetry to sell consumer commodities, and intensify emotions, not to impart any sense of beauty or deliver crucial information. As an essential investigative tool and mode of thought, poetry is in a state of disuse, misuse and disrepair that indirectly threatens the continued survival of the human species and of life itself. Unfortunately, I don’t have any practical suggestions about how to rectify this that won’t require several years and 2000 pages of prose to articulate.

Unbidden--or perhaps conditioned by my enhanced understanding of what twentieth century lyric poetry was a response to, these questions now pop up: What about the therapeutic value of poetry? What’s wrong with using poetry as a tool of self-exploration and an instrument of simple self-expression?

The poetry I wrote before I quit publishing was nearly always crudely self-expressive, and I moved on because my instincts told me that self-expression for a working writer was irrelevant. Then, perhaps ironically, I spent a full decade of the ensuing years that followed teaching prison inmates cultural literacy in various disguises–creative and technical writing, various history and English literature course. During those years, I came to see how fundamental the urge toward self expression is during periods of crisis. Whether the crises are private, legal/criminal, or global doesn’t seem to matter. Prison showed me how much more productive and safe life is for everyone when the urge to express oneself is trained and educated, however slightly we were able to accomplish that inside a jail. It made me change my mind about the uses of poetry as self-expression.