I have been thinking about poetry, not as a delivery system for beauty but as a 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 poets are likely to have the blues and few would argue. I think it was the poet Donald Hall who said poets generally write from unhappiness. The blues are not just a cris de coeur they’re also a structure of suspicion. Someone has done you wrong. Death has entered your house while you were eating your breakfast. Before this morning is over you’re going to have to dig a hole.
Theorizing about poetry is often fruitless. 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.
Planet of the Blind 