The Offices of Poetry

— One of those books I own and will never let go of is Mickey Rourke and the Bluebird of Happiness: A Poet’s Notebooks by W.S. Di Piero. In some ways, it doesn’t look like much, it’s a slim volume, but some of the thoughts it holds have changed me, helped me, opened me up. The style of writing, the form, these too have been useful. — I’ve quoted from it before at length, but today this: “The offices of poetry. To use shapely speech to express the radicals of existence in all their ambiguity. To answer idiosyncratically, privately, to a public world given over to falsehood, fake facts, scuzzy rumour, casual murderousness, comedic denials, manic vicious wind tunnel ideologies. To answer palsied language with vital language, plasticity, gaiety of invention and fabulation, over against opportunistic mendacity. If poetry can’t, or chooses not to, reveal what it feels like to live as a sentient being in a perilous enchanted world, then maybe it really is marginal or beside the point.” —…