June 28 2025

Finally back to reading “Why Poetry”. I received this as a Christmas gift, started reading right away, and had to stop when spring semester began. I’m only 60 pages in and this book is so darn good.

“French poet Charles Baudelaire rejected all poetic convention entirely, including rhyme, meter, and even line breaks, creating the oxymoronic “Prose Poem” (p 64) **Baudelaire is my spirit poet!! This man must live in my poetry veins!**

Unlike prose, the prose poem is freed of any responsibility to consistency. The purpose of the poem is above all else to create an atmosphere: it is to enact the feeling of starting, impossibly, to understand what it is that yes up the human soul.

The one thing poetry can do is to remind us of a time when we were, as a species, in a sort of childlike state of perpetual wonder.”