"The TV that interposes a virtual reality between a viewer and the world as it is makes getting to the terms behind everyday life very difficult. To imitate the casual, superficial inconsistencies of daily life in a poem, as in a sitcom, isn't difficult, but to deal with the structure and underlying assumptions of the commercial life requires making it a game in order to expose its social pretensions, its hypocritical manipulation of customers, and its gross distortions of language. For years, no aspect of life was untouched by poetry--Celia Thaxter and John Greenleaf Whittier considered it normal to correspond almost daily in verse. Now, no minute in our public life is ad-free. Our real experiences remain hidden, often mysterious to our inarticulate selves, who keep supposing there must be some way to find an adequate correlation among our strange, metaphysical moments. The poet who by an act of imagination discovers an apt gesture to embody the dramatic ambiguities that envelop us creates the release we're looking for."
--F.D. Reeve
"Inadequate Memory and the Adequate Imagination"
American Poetry Review
May/Jun2003
