Response to Justin Boening at NPM Daily

"As a reader, however, I find, especially in this moment—a moment when we ask our poems to be useful, to be active (politically and socially), in a moment when we demand, even, that a poet know what her poems might mean—I cleave to that trait of poetry that originally, when I was fifteen years dumb, invited me in. Sure, poetry cast its spell on me through its usual avenues—its strange collision of recklessness and order, ecstasy and sadness, conservation and revolution, et cetera—but, without a doubt, the quality that kept roping me back toward it was that I didn’t have the slightest fucking clue what any of it meant."  --Justin Boening at NPM Daily.

I really like this quote by Justin Boening.  I resist in my own work the demand that it be useful, that it be understood.  I think of initially reading Charles Simic and being weirded out by the poetry.  It's enough that poetry is beautiful in some way and some form, I think.  Thanks, Justin, for promoting this view of poetry.