I have been thinking about poetry, not as a delivery system for beauty but as a http://correspondent articulation of suspicion. By articulation I mean structure and the voicing of structure and by suspicion I mean the human distrust of cant or doctrine.
We could say that poets are likely to have the blues and few would argue the point. I think it was the poet Donald Hall who remarked that poets generally write from unhappiness. The blues are not just a cris de coeur but are also a structure of suspicion. Someone has done you wrong. Death has entered your house while you were eating your morning bread. Before this morning is over you’re going to have to dig a hole to put the devil in. We will have to dig a hole for the devil before noon.
Theorizing about poetry is often fruitless for beyond metaphors and their aptness or their cultural liabilities (outworn, tired, cliched) poetry is about suspicion. Poetry is rhythmic suspicion.
No one in his or her right mind would want to theorize suspicion.
Well, you say, that’s what Levi-Strauss did. And that’s what deconstruction is about.
But no. The language of curiosity and doubt is something you can analyze but you can’t theorize as you’re making it. The best you can do when making it is what we call articulation. You can be ironic, categorical, histrionic, wry, understated, sentimental, silly, or angry.
In its making, poetry is a resistance to theoretical impulses as surely as weeping is a resistance to the impersonal nature of human suffering.
This is why I cannot be a theorist.
Your theory and my blues are not of the same zoological exhibit.
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 
I think of poetry as being a celebration of language — the meaning, sound & rhythm of words, and their ability to evoke feeling, thought, time or place. I listen to the angry poems and the sad poems, because these are the “taboo”, the secret feelings that should not be expressed, but can be so powerful in their potential to change or at the very least acknowledge a more complete rendering of an environment. But I love silly poems, because I love to laugh:
There was an awful bugaboo
Whose eyes were red and hair was blue.
His teeth were long and sharp and white,
And he would prowl around at night.
This is a poem that begs me to read onward. It is in my trilogy of poems for women to grow by that all end with powerful life lessons:
So, children, when in bed tonight,
Don’t let them take away the light,
Or else the awful bugaboo
Will come and fly away with you.
From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,
Know one false step is n’er retreived,
And be with caution bold.
Not all that tempts your wandering eyes
And heedless hearts is lawful prize,
Nor all that glisters gold.
At that mother got proper blazin’,
And, “Thank you, sir, kindly,” said she.
“What spend all our lives raising children
To feed bloody lions? Not me!”
Sure, there’s finer poetry, but who’s to resist this stuff? SK, you might have known better than to assent when your cousin offered you a wedgie if you’d been reading more moral warnings in poetry at an earlier age. Doncha think?
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