Poetry is a Stubborn Art

The following is a quote from an Edward Hirsch essay. I love the way he teases meaning and connects dots, without forgetting a sense of empirical humaness. His interpretation and explanation of poetry is as clear as William Hazlitt. Mmm A True Critic; every century needs one. 

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"We live in a superficial, media-driven culture that often seems uncomfortable with true depths of feeling. Indeed, it seems as if our culture has become increasingly intolerant of that acute sorrow, that intense mental anguish and deep remorse which may be defined as grief. We want to medicate such sorrow away. We want to divide it into recognizable stages so that grief can be labeled, tamed, and put behind us. But poets have always celebrated grief as one of the deepest human emotions. To grieve is to lament, to mourn, to let sorrow inhabit one's very being.

Robert Frost liked to distinguish between grievances (complaints) and griefs (sorrows). He even suggested that grievances, which are propagandistic, should be restricted to prose, "leaving poetry free to go its way in tears." Implicit in poetry is the notion that we are deepened by heartbreaks, that we are not so much diminished as enlarged by grief, by our refusal to vanish--to let others vanish--without leaving a verbal record. Poetry is a stubborn art. The poet is one who Will not be reconciled, who is determined to leave a trace in words, to transform oceanic depths of feeling into the faithful nuances of art."

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Tyler Mccabe, what do you think? 

Anyways, I'm sitting here in the library with two essays hanging over my shoulders. I hope and pray I will be able to summon the creativity needed to string a few words together in logical order. logic. My Greatest Struggle. Otherwise I will be packing up and moving out soon. This episode of Seattle is about to end. Up next is South Africa and Other Travels, if you didn't know. But what a year, am I right? My plants on my dresser are dead; I forgot to water them. But my mind is not. My heart is not. I am alive! I am alive with unsounded depths! 

Oh the power of an exclamation. 

The library is closing, they are flickering the lights, we've got to get out of here.