This Is the Barbarains

(excerpts)

In the US poetry exists outside the market forces; what results is the agony and the ecstasy, the best and the worst. Some of the poetry was amateurish beyond belief. Some was just dull. Some of it smoked. And some of it was almost too good for words, so good it almost pissed me off. A roomful of ferociously individual voices, the best of whom nevertheless seemed to be swimming in the same direction, if along different routes. It was a poetry of confrontation, subtle and otherwise, sexual, political and moral, a poetry of personal risk, of exposure verging on the indecent. It got me hot.
...But I probably learned more about writing poetry as a journalist than I ever did in a poetry workshop. I took a couple of writing workshops a long time ago, but people are just too goddamned sensitive. Writing features thousands of words long on a deadline, and then raking them over the coals with a hard-nosed line editor on even tighter deadlines, you learn about having a beginning, middle, end, about having a strong lead, about being ruthless with your work; learn how to step back from it and, with a killer's eye, cut out the fat so the gold can gleam. Most writing is cutting. The enemy of feeling is sentiment. Barbarian poetry is about feeling.


~ David Lerner