Ars poetica poems by Dave Read

The world of American poetry has been in the wrong hands since around the time I joined it, in the late 1960s. Since Bennett Cerf’s Famous Writers School was sued out of existence in 1970, more than 750 creative writing programs, including MFAs and PhDs, have sprung up on American campuses and throughout the zoomable universe!

It makes you wonder why? Who gains by professing to embody such expertise as will justify the trade of time and tuition for knowledge of how to transfer from mind and soul to page and screen what one already knows to be true? How did people like Whitman, Dickinson, and Frost learn to do it without professional help? These poems show me trying to work out the nature of poetry and the role of the poet and why Mister Charlie seems so eager to own it.