Sometimes it is easier to say what something is not than to say what it is, especially when that thing is one of those perennially shifting (sub/ob)jects like poetry or god. Via the Seattle Craigslist listing of writing gigs, I found precisely what I do not want to see in poetry: Purity of Poetry.
Perhaps it is simply an unfortunate choice of name, but if words matter anywhere it is in poetry and thus, by extension, in discussions of poetry. I want poems, and really all kinds of art, that play on the boundaries, that seek out contamination by what is non-artistic, non-literary, and strange. I want to see work that makes the distinction between pure and contaminated nil.
Poetry is not like gold that cannot be used when pure, for that would imply that those forms closest to pure are somehow ideal.
You may wonder why I haven’t discussed any of the poetry on this site that represents the opposite of what I want to see in poetry. It is because the “poems” bore me, and so I have no desire to do so. (This is also why I write far more positive reviews than negative ones, and even negative ones tend to contain at least some ambivalence.)
