The essay started by suggesting that verse has become a technically obsolete art form that new media has recently rendered culturally and cognitively incomprehensible to most people. I went a long way out of my way to diss both the publishing apparatus behind its publication in Canada and the self-expression industry that has built itself around verse everywhere as the product of feckless neurotics, incompetent exhibitionists, lazy, grant-sucking publishers and cyber-capitalist opiates too numerous and loathsome to name.

But I wasn’t completely bloody-minded in my condemnations. I made what felt like a slightly cute distinction between verse-making and poetry, then announced that I believed that poetry remained "the most profound manifestation of human imagination that exists, and …one of the most powerful tools human intelligence has ever devised–the act from which nearly all civilized behaviors have derived."

The polemical altitude I reached with that zinger made me feel giddy, but I wanted to go higher before I sent everything crashing down to the level of common sense. So I shifted ground, rustled my priestly cassock, rubbed my hands along the edges of the pulpit, and murmured that I couldn’t "imagine living a life that does not have poetry somewhere near its centre." After adding that fewer people now read poetry than write it and that publication has become either a sour academic sport or a semi-obligatory response to the availability of government publishing subsidies, I concluded that I couldn’t see any acceptable reason for continuing to publish verse.

I’d plunged one foot recklessly far into what felt like very sticky truths, and so I thought, well, why not sink deeper to the logical conclusions at the base of those truths? I allowed that I was intellectually embarrassed by the lack of rigor in contemporary verse manufacture, including my own, and that I wanted to do a kind of writing that had some degree of affective influence on things, indirect or direct. Until I could produce the kind of verse in which the investigative rather than the self-revelatory elements were in the forefront, I’d desist from further public waste of paper and public attention and would inflict no more unwanted poesy on sleepy audiences.

But it wasn’t until I said I was going to take a ten year raincheck on the business of publishing poetry, and then made a deadly serious proposition that other poets do likewise, that I got myself into serious trouble. The business I was making sport of, you see, really is a biz, within which moderately lucrative and very secure teaching careers can be wrought, money made, and absurd quantities of over-distilled self regard bottled for the decline. Entrepreneurs even leave their silver trails across the walls and ceilings of the temples of contemporary verse, just like in the real world. When the essay was published, "the Biz" simply disappeared me. I can’t recall a single publishing poet who has acknowledged the existence of that essay since it was published, and only one or two academics who have gone beyond rolling their eyes and tsk, tsking me about it.