I am a poet. At least I used to be. I’ve got the books and the performance tapes and the tour posters to prove it. I write lots of stuff every day, but I don’t write a whole lot of poems anymore. I never read books of poetry– I honestly cannot stand what passes for modern American poetry. It’s mainly anger-cadence slop from the performance scene or neurotic detailed description from the Academy. No thanks.
But every day I read the New York Times. It is my daily poetry book. My advice to any young poet out there: if you can’t write a better poem than the one I read this morning– the one delivered to my door at about 4:30 AM, the one that was just a set of observations yesterday afternoon, the one that was printed on newsprint last night, then try harder. Try much harder.
All hail Dan Barry. Here’s a bit below, but read the whole thing.
Macabre Reminder: The Corpse on Union Street
Scraggly residents emerge from waterlogged wood to say strange things, and then return into the rot. Cars drive the wrong way on the Interstate and no one cares. Fires burn, dogs scavenge, and old signs from les bons temps have been replaced with hand-scrawled threats that looters will be shot dead.
The incomprehensible has become so routine here that it tends to lull you into acceptance. On Sunday, for example, several soldiers on Jefferson Highway had guns aimed at the heads of several prostrate men suspected of breaking into an electronics store.
A car pulled right up to this tense scene and the driver leaned out his window to ask a soldier a question: "Hey, how do you get to the interstate?"
Maybe the slow acquiescence to the ghastly here – not in Baghdad, not in Rwanda, here – is rooted in the intensive news coverage of the hurricane’s aftermath: floating bodies and obliterated towns equal old news. Maybe the concerns of the living far outweigh the dignity of a corpse on Union Street. Or maybe the nation is numb with post-traumatic shock.