"Start spreadin' the news"

The voices of great poets and         their good opinions

have hauled Aeacus, dripping, 

  out of the Styx

and made him immortal in the 

  Blessed Isles.

Poets won't let praiseworthy men die.

Poets lift them to heaven. Castor     and Pollux 

burn in the night sky because of us

And rescue ships in peril, and

  Hercules

himself is feasting with Jove

  because we said so

and Bacchus, with vine tendrils       curled at his ears,

because of us, grants you your

  anxious prayers.

I'm extremely pleased to be in December, and I regard this as one of the most important postings the page has yet carried. Horace is making some astonishing assertions here, and so I propose the mantle of 'poetry' for those who do what he says, regardless of what they do. I cite the good and inconspicuous work of the Southern Poverty Law Center for performing exactly the function Horace claimed for poets - without, to be sure, claiming it exclusively. The recital of the slightest discord is unmusical to so many fastidious ears, that I feel compelled to commend to them the dreadfully 'unpoetic' element in that stance. I cite the belated and enormously long-fought conversion of The New York Times to the position of poetry on the issue they address in this reference, for presenting it to our contemporary Agora with passion proportioned to the case.


But I also cite that very mercantile world of haberdashery (you may call it, design, as I do), much disparaged for furnishing the visual analogies of many of my postings, as if to prove a polemic against desire. I think that when the history of the persistence of poetry in the United States in this unending Age of Reagan is written, we are going to name the advertising campaigns of some pretty negligible vendors for sustaining it.


Most of all I am happy to be in December because this is the month in the West when poetical contemplations seem the least incongruous, and 'taste' is on the table to celebrate the sharing, more than the acquiring of finer things. I encourage readers and friends to know we are poets, inescapably. 








Horace
Odes, iv, 8
David Wagoner, translation
J.D. McClatchy, editor
Princeton University Press, 2002©



ii, Mathias Lauridsen