The mockery (Phillips)
The most ambitious contemporary poets tend to be haunted by the ridiculousness of poetry, its irrelevance, its pretentiousness, the selectiveness of its attention and the kind of focus required for its reading. "I, too, dislike it," Marianne Moore's three-line poem "Poetry" begins: "Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in/ it, after all, a place for the genuine." Because poetry is always tempted to pose as poetry rather than to say or sound like something unusual and interesting (i.e. genuine), it is often on the verge of self-parody. It's this that gives the best modern poetry its edge. Unlike prose writers, poets are like stand-up comics; their bad lines are dangerous because there are worse things than being ignored. Poetry is always high-risk because of the mockery that is always around, especially in the poet himself.
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