Oppositional Productivity
Modern poetry modern verse contemporary poetry contemporary verse modern poem contemporary poem
Emotion is as difficult to free
From poetry as cultures’ deepest faiths
From superstition. It will have its spree
Inside those doctrines like a house’s wraiths
Will haunt the farthest nooks with sorrow flown
From slimed irrationality. The mind
Can scar a poem with its scalpels known
Too well for cold precision cutting twined
Entanglements like life. Emotions come
Inside the reader not from in the brain
Of poets. Frontal lobes don’t want to thrum
With static. They desire the strictured sane.
But somewhere in between these countering two
A poem rises like a roiling coup.
~ Phillip Whidden