Imaginary Essays

from an essay by Rick Synder:

"Today, the poet's activity in Western society has been entirely bracketed and presented as meaningless, as worthy of no money, the sole standard of contemporary meaning."

...

"Are poets the metastasized idealism to that materialism of bodybuilders, both so wholly out of line with contemporary reality as to seem a freakish curiosity, at once frightening and funny?"

[[so who's the bodybuilding equivalent of, say, Helen Vendler?]]

...

"Thus liberated...[the poet is free] to question the comforts of the known, of cell phones, keyboards, interstates, tenure, mortgages, exegesis and other elements of an inhuman reality that we create and are created by."

but how many poets question these things with great intellectual/creative acuity in his/her writing practice only to submit to these things in matters pertaining to his/her lifestyle? that would be impossible to gauge because who's judging? seems like it would lead down the more-[insert virtue here]-than-thou path.

"...how would you work to create a reality in which life was more than a biological condition bound by the strictures of production and consumption...?"

"'Reality is not simply there,' Paul Celan wrote in 1958, 'it must be searched and won.'"