Poetry is so useless absolutely no cash value. It s an act of desperation. A friend of mine, a teacher, says there s no doubt that poetry saved his life got him out of the impoverished life he lived as a child in Detroit. It gave him something beyond his life, and I think it did that for me, on a different level. But there is a kind of spiritual, aesthetic impoverishment that one longs to transcend.
Poetry can help with that.
There is a certain kind of art loosely termed art where your prejudices are reinforced by looking at it or reading it. That s not real art. There has to be some surprise. You can t just make it up. And all of that s hard, because you do make it up.