Poetic evangelism …

… Twenty Poems That Could Save America And Other Essays By Tony Hoagland — The Rumpus.net. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

What Hoagland doesn’t seem to realize is that he needn’t have depicted contemporary America as a linguistically inadequate, insufficiently educated and culturally lacking country in order to make his points. His assessments of our culture seem naïve and a little old-fashioned (and a little disconcertedly Freudian), which undercut his overall project. It is not required that the world be in dire straits in order for a writer to propose ways to improve it.

Poetry should be grounded in the world as it is, not as you think it ought to be.