Thursday, November 22, 2012

Treating Poetry Like Painting


The case for making contemporary poetry accessible to a wider public by putting it in museums and galleries, care of Hazlitt.

From the piece...

But mostly what I envy painters for is art galleries. Just walking into an art gallery gives me a feeling of uplift. I love libraries too, but the feeling in a library is that you will paw around ferretting out information, whereas in a gallery the feeling is that enlightenment will come to you. You don’t have to know anything when you get there. You just check your coat, mash the clip-on tag to your collar, and trust that whatever you need to know will be explained as you go along.

This is why I propose that the best way to make contemporary poetry accessible to a wider public would be to put it in museums.

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