I’ve been thinking why I like a poem.

                  Aesthetics offer asylum from the world’s woes. Thinking about words’ ways I am not thinking about the moment’s miseries and mischief. Poems may irk but they do not aggrieve. Even the least successful is an honest attempt. Hate rails and sneers, it does not rhyme.

                  Beneath all human activity exists a reservoir of principles from which our choices arise. Every choice is moral: that is, it reflects a sense of the best way to be. Politics, aesthetics, personal behavior all draw on the same set of principles. The notion that you can be monster on the job and a good dad at home is hogwash. A monster is a monster, a liar a liar, a good person good wherever they’re placed.

                  The qualities I most prize in a poem are lucidity, generosity, and modesty.  I like a poem that’s glad to see me, eager to please me, and doesn’t demean or deride my understanding. I like nursery jingles with their rhythms and rhymes. I like poems whose music endears before their sense confronts. I like poems that invite me to dance. I resent poems I must decode before enjoying. Poems should be

sung,
not thought,
felt,
not taught.
First the dance,
romance,
trance,
then sense,
consequence.

                 Deliberate obscurity afflicts me as arrogance, hostility, or both. Much modernist poetry requires an encyclopedia and roadmap to see the reader through. Ezra Pound is my poster boy for hateful hauteur. The exhausting erudition of his Cantos sneers at my hayseed illiteracy. If his so-called verse excludes me as an insufficient reader, he’s appealing to the narrowest of elites!

                 This bias ran counter to the academic fashion of my student days, so I shut up about it. I hate a quarrel. Debates about aesthetics persuade no one and produce word-soup. Most of my adult life I stopped reading poems because I had no one to talk to about them. It thrilled me that readers of these missives enjoyed jawing about poems. That set me to seeking poems to share and wonder why I liked those I liked.

                 In all writing, I favor urgency. The writer really needs to say what they’re saying in this way. They’re not goofing around or showing off, not wasting their time or mine. They use as few words as necessary – concision is a form of respect – and as vivid as they can muster. Prose thinks and poems feel, though obviously the forms overlap. I aim to write prose as vital as a good poem.

                 What I like in a poem, I like in a politician. Tell me the truth as lucidly as you can. Value my attention and understanding. Don’t treat me as ignorant or inferior just because you know more. Level with me, don’t bullshit. 

                 The mendacious garrulity of the Nameless One nauseates me. His every word insults me with its fraudulence and swagger (not to mention its garbled grammar). I shut my ears to anything he or his goons say, for they’re all liars.

                 Rhetoric reflects morality. Liars are indecent deep down. Corrupt language issues from a corrupt soul. Entire truth is inexpressible, but to strive in that direction is our moral imperative. “Lie not,” exhorts blessèd George Herbert,

                       but let thy heart be true to God,
Thy mouth to it, thy actions to them both:
Cowards tell lies, and those that fear the rod;
The stormie working soul spits lies and froth.
Dare to be true. Nothing can need a lie:
A fault, which needs it most, grows two thereby.

Spot-on advice for poets, politicians, all.