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So, I had occasion this year to come to the defense of the art of poetry as an important part of a particular town's identity. Since the town in question was being condescended to by the Big City arts scene with such comments as "Oh, please, does it even have a soul?" I wrote this in response. I think it speaks to the importance of the art and to how it helps us to get through life.
Poetry in the Suburbs
We don’t need poetry in the suburbs, here. We have drive-thru, and take-out, and delivery And that is plenty. We have no midnights, where fear grows teeth and no daylight to pull them; we have burglar alarms. No ball ever bounces foul here, no hero quails. We have X-Box. No mother sits vigil by her child’s bed at night, her chest so tight she hitches her breath and offers everything she has, everything she will ever have, grasping for the words to make the promise and the strength to say it—“Please.” We don’t need poetry here. No girl’s heart peers out from beneath the thorn bush of her discontent; No colt-legged boy wears his like a beacon, or a chain. We have free parking, and mowed lawns, And the smell of new paving never leaves the air. And if the tattered man at the off ramp, holding a sign “Homeless—Will work—Anything helps—God Bless” Makes us tremble and look away, we don’t need a way to say to him, “If what I think of you is wrong, I am most humbly sorry,” Nor a way to go home afterward, and say to one another, over and over again, like poets do, how easily it all can be, will be, lost.
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