Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

This is actually a really old discourse. From Plato’s banishment of poets to the whole traditional genre of a defense of poetry, poetry always has to be defended. You don’t have ‘this is a defense of piano’ or ‘this is a defense of dance.’

Poetry is always the thing that’s supposed to be the best thing in a culture. We use the word poetic as a superlative; we say about an athlete, ‘It’s like poetry in motion,’ but then we also say poetry is dead or we hate it or we think its vacuous or pompous.

That tension of celebration and disavowal is as old as poetry itself. I think part of it has to do with the fact that poetry is in some sense impossible. Poetry is a word we use to denote the perfect linguistic object. That’s the poem. It’s supposed to be better than prose, it’s supposed to be deeper and more precise and more beautiful.

And of course, you never get the perfect poem. There’s no such thing. So there’s this structure of frustration built into poetry.