I began to feel that a great deal of human interaction, a large portion of real moral sensibility and concern, had somehow been usurped from the poets by the novel and drama...It felt to me as though anything that was on a large emotional scale, anything truly passionate, absorbing, or crucial, had been forsaken by poetry. What the poets of our time seemed to be left with were subtleties, hair-splittings, minute recordings of a delicate atmosphere.
—C. K. Williams
Rage
Rage
The impulse
or the urge
to destroy everything
that constrains my liberty
(which is everything),
the need to be freed
—
now!—
ends all thought,
rends the heart,
renders the body
helpless, less;
fight
and flight collapse,
compact
into a single
seething
surging
hot con-
fusion.
Where am I,
so easy to wash away
in a poisoned pulse?
Labels: poetry