Speaking last week at an event celebrating the anthology Best American Poetry 2008, UCP poet Charles Bernstein proclaimed his staunch support for a poetry bailout aimed at restoring readers’ confidence.
“As you know,” Bernstein argued, “the glut of illiquid, insolvent, and troubled poems is clogging the literary arteries of the West. These debt-ridden poems threaten to infect other areas of the literary sector and ultimately to topple our culture industry.” Gawker was inspired by this impassioned address to ponder “whether this liquidity crunch has begotten too many issuances of new metaphors.”
And we’ve got more where that came from: Bernstein’s polemic against National Poetry Month is just as inspiring.