Introduction
Poetry in a Time of Uncertainty and Plenitude |
| We live in an age of plenitude, an age of muchness, the muchness age, and that means poetry, too. But some people who love poetry love also to bewail its tiny status, its lack of money and fame, its permanent position in America's backseat, rumble seat, potty chair; poetry seems all but obliterated in our culture, seems mummified and miniaturized beside so many lively and important things, things of which there is so muchso much TV, so much rock and roll, so much news, so much Mozart; so many sports, so many games, so many contests on TV; so much style, so many clothes and earrings and noserings and pierced eyebrows; so much purple hair, so many redheads, henna-heads, blonde-and-hennaheads, skinheads, ponytailheads, ponytail-emerging-from-buzzcutheads; so many movies, so many films, so much cinematography; so many people, so much population problem; so many novels, so much fiction, so many exposs, so many true stories, true confessions, false confessions; so many serial murderers, so many loaded guns, so much random killing, so much crack cocaine, so many drug dealers; so much terror, so much doubt, so much uncertainty; so much death of God, so much fundamentalism, so many TV preachers, so many infomercials, so many one-day seminars, so much team building, so many hucksters, critics, theorists; so much real world, so many trees and shrubs and squirrels and mourning doves, so many varieties of azaleas, so many beautiful cars, so much automotive splendor, so many drivers, so many readers, so many writers and poets, so much art, so much poetry, so much contemporary poetry. |
| No one book could comprehend it all, and this one does not intend to: although I have chosen to write only about poets whose work I admire, I am by |
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