“A History of Modern Poetry” [by David Lehman, chosen by George Bilgere]

A History of Modern Poetry

by David Lehman

The idea was to have a voice of your own,

distinctive, sounding like nobody else’s

The result was that everybody sounded alike

The new idea was to get rid of ideas

and substitute images especially the image

of a rock so everyone wrote a poem

with the image of a rock in it capped with snow

or unadorned this was in the early 1970s

a few years before Pet Rocks were a Christmas craze

showing that poetry was ahead of its time as usual

and poetry had moved on

the new idea was to make language the subject

because language was an interference pattern

there was no such thing as unmediated discourse

and the result was that everybody sounded alike

__________

From When a Woman Loves a Man, Scribner, 2005.

Photograph: Nenad Saljic.