Archive for November, 2006

Why ‘conservative’ poetry is only one thing, not the other


I find myself almost mortally offended by the discovery I made today that someone can take the words ‘conservative’ and ‘poetry’ and put them together to form a pretender to the title of genre.

I’m not in the habit of dissing other peoples’ blogs because there are so many I like and so many more I don’t like or even find utterly objectionable in content, but I make an exception today. Take a look at this one.

Scary.

The title of the blog differs from what’s in the URL. You see that what we’re presented with as a given is allegedly ‘Canadian Political Poetry’. All caps. Now, I do believe poetry can be political. Absolutely it can. You only need to check out hundreds of poems in my archive to find topics such as taxation, debt, public smoking bans, sexuality, greed, global warming, Iraq and more being ruminated on in verse. Poetry is inherently political both in the widest sense of the word, and the narrowest.

Read the full article.

Wednesday, November 29th, 2006