Q&A …

… Poetry and Song: The Sublime Spirituals of Kwame Dawes - Los Angeles Review of Books.

What shatters that magic of those early moments is when we discard that element of delight, play, and mystery for the business that happens in the middle-school classroom that turns the play of language into study, into labor, and into a negotiation between certainty and received assurances of meaning. We stop associating poetry with something everybody does, but with something related to academics and study. I am not talking about the difference between spoken word and book poetry, as some are wont to do. The tyranny of form as a polemical force crosses both of these genres, and sadly, even the spoken word rarely enters the atavistic realm of mystery and incantation that I believe should be part of the poetic impulse. It is not, either, a distinction between so-called “academic poetry” and “popular poetry.”