What do you feel poetry can accomplish that other forms can’t?
There are so many other ways of documenting things, thanks to technology, but I still feel that poetry is the best, most portable and universal way of simply telling us “what happened” and capturing the particular language of the tribe, as Lew Welch said. When I say “tribe” I mean one’s immediate group of peers in a particular time and place. Social media has exploded and commodified so much of this process – see, for example, the way local urban dance moves get co-opted and pushed out to the masses via TikTok – but poetry can act as a low-profile, organic means of tracing the way people talk and what happens to them, circulating the findings without flattening them out into something slick and commercial.
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