Somebody left the comment that I should make the blogness of the blog more bloggy, but it's not really a blog, I don't check in as I should. Plus there is the problem of being populist--writers are supposed to be iconoclastic, not populist, populism taints. However...

I have been thinking about poetry's purpose, having offered brainless nonthoughts about this in the past. Now it seems to me that poetry in fact has many purposes. Here's one, #7, the populist purpose: it is our civic glue. Well, at least for those who want to be glued. Certain poems mark our cultural rites of passage, but: do we still have poems that operate in this manner, the way "Howl" did? Where/what are our public poems now?

There was also Philip Levine's "They Feed They Lion," holding its mirror to the race riots of the 60's.

They Feed They Lion

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones' need to sharpen and the muscles' to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
"Come home, Come home!" From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From "Bow Down" come "Rise Up,"
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
___________
I never understood the poem well until I heard Levine explain how he had a job in his youth, doing something like unpacking ball bearings, and one of his black co-workers held up one of the burlap sacks they were using, noting that it was from the zoo. "They feed they lion from they sack." A co-opting of dialect? Yeah, maybe, sure. But probably the most enduring exposition of those times.

Need to work on the first six reasons.