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This is the fifth time that I have attempted to post in the last 2 hours. I’m going to try several small posts ….
‘The fate of poetry depends on whether such a work as Schiller’s and Beethoven’s ‘Ode To Joy’ is possible. For that to be so, some basic confidence is needed, a sense of open space ahead of the individual and the human species” – Czeslaw Milosz in The Witness of Poetry Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983 (pp. 14).

Just as art and music are continually being removed from the curriculum of “Uhmareihkun Ehdukayshuhn”, I fully expect that, in the not too distant future, that the reading and writing of poetry will also be removed.
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“If you don’t want a man unhappy politically, don’t give him two sides to a question to worry him; give him one. Better yet, give him none. Let him forget there is such a thing as war. If the government is inefficient, top-heavy, and tax-mad, better it be all those than that people worry over it. Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of noncombustible data, chock them so damned full of ‘facts’ they feel stuffed, but absolutely ‘brilliant’ with information. Then they’ll feel they’re thinking, they’ll get a sense of motion without moving. And they’ll be happy, because facts of that sort don’t change.”

“But you can’t make people listen. They have to come round in their own time, wondering what happened and why the world blew up around them. It can’t last.”
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

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Scott, Peter Dale – in addition to being as astute observer of history and politics he is also an accomplished poet.

See his Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror.
… and also

– Anger in Paradise: The Poetic Voicing of Disorder in Pound’s Later Cantos, (pp. 47-63) in Paideuma, Volume 19, Number 3, 1990.

– Pound in “The Waste Land,” Eliot in The Cantos (pp. 99-114) in Paideuma, Volume 19, Number 3, 1990.

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