Angry, Pained, and Appalling

You better believe it!

An internet magazine called The Rumpus has reviewed The Fortunes of Poetry in an Age of Unmaking and has really felt in the heart the sharp point of its meaning.  Anyone familiar with the poetry of our age (such as that often praised in The Rumpus) will know that a great art form is being ill-served by the mighty mass of its current practitioners.  If you are not "angry" about that, you should be.  Fortunes is a steady guide to what has gone wrong, why it ought to be corrected, and, as far as possible, how we might get things right and make the art of poetry a living form in our day.

The word I use in the preface of Fortunes to describe its early pages is not "anger," but "dismay."  But let's not split hairs.  Let's call bad art what is it and figure out how we can cultivate a more genuinely humane and beautiful culture amid the welter and rumpus of trash and pretension that currently passes for art.  As I also say in the preface, literature is a thing worth fighting for: let us try to restore it to the pantheon of the many good things of this world.

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