Disconcert. Defamiliarize. Distort. Disrupt. Draw, Stardust!
A friend I’ll nickname Stardust, avid prose reader, has remarked that relatively few people have a taste for poetry nowadays. I surmise it’s always been so, even in this or that era when <name-your-Great-Poet> flourished. The Great One would have been lionized by a coterie of fans in a populous land of nonreaders.
Poets are a few obsessives bent on strewing words just so, in a way the next person can’t, applecart-tipping and necessary. Their readers are a peculiar lot bent on stewing over those words. I like to think of doggerel, tangentially, as poetry’s running dog. Hail to thee, blithe mutt! Bird thou never wert.
The pivot point in this spiel is that Stardust is a skilled artist who can reify in line, value and hue what a poet does in words:
I did not want / the moment to end / then stopped wanting / so I could / be, not yearn,…
(Lia Purpura, from “Intersection”, Poetry, September 2025)
“Did not want… then stopped wanting… be, not yearn,” Impossible to say differently that’s better. Both Stardust and Lia Purpura can turn a flash of perception into a thing that lingers, and completes itself in the psyche of another human.
If Stardust is ever pierced by a poem-moment, and there’s no special need for that to happen from where I stand, there’s hundred’s of feet of fertile loam accrued in my friend’s delta of sensibility for it to root in. Stardust will have perceived the poem as lines, akin to a sketch that works unusually well.
(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved
EthicalDative 
It is true that for many reasons poetry has lost its place. But ’twas not ever thus.
In August 1914, the London Times received at least 100 poems a day from its readers. During WW1 2,000 poets were published in England alone and in Germany it is estimated that 50,000 poems were written a day in August 1914. In the first year of “Stars and Stripes” (1918) it receivd over 18,000 poetry submissions and the column “The Army’s Poets” was touted as among the most widely read.
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A quantity of verse indeed! I’ve never seen it quantified so. I would say the flow continues apace today. I can barely stay abreast of one monthly journal (Poetry magazine) and several online versifying venues. Thank you for your instructive comment.
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You are very persuasive Jim! Your posts have sharpened my appreciation of poetry.
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And you are very kind, Sue! Cheers and regards.
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