Q&A …

… An Interview with A.M. Juster. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

I am not a big fan of poetry about the partisan politics of the moment, such as Calvin Trillin’s epigrams in The Nation. Such poems tend to be painfully predictable and become rapidly less interesting as the election cycle tumbles along. 

The greatest political poetry from Horace to Yeats, Auden, Walcott, Szymborska and Zagajewski ignores the specific disputes of the time and focuses on our successes and failures as political beings. Important political poetry also comes from poets, such as Adrienne Rich, Wendell Berry, and Terrance Hayes, whose pervasive ideologies provide new lenses for viewing the world.

I'm more with him on that.