Poetry kicks ass!  Yes, poetry comes at one from “out there” and rattles our cage…but only if our “cage” is amenable to being rattled!  But most of us are appropriately “human-ized” and have a cage which is hermetically sealed to protect us from anything “out there.”  We humans currently are having a lessen given to us about being “hermetically-sealed” in this “small bright circle of our consciousness, beyond which lies the dark” even though it is in this “dark” that we might begin to see the Light.   

Whew!  Now, I’ve settled down.  Let me explain.  I just this morning discovered another brilliant poet in The Paris Review, Zoe Hitzig, who is a doctoral student in economics at Harvard University.  Yes, I did say, “doctoral student ‘in economics’” as crazy as that sounds for a poet! 

Here I want to share some wisdom she offered in quoting another literary figure, Grace Paley, “One of the things art is about, for me, is justice. Now that isn’t a matter of opinion, really. That isn’t to say, ‘I’m going to show these people right or wrong’ or whatever… [It’s] the illumination of what isn’t known, the lighting up of what is under a rock, of what has been hidden.” 

Poetry brings “justice” as it exposes that which has been hidden.  And, I might add, “justice” has been pretty hard on me the past 35 or so years since it deigned to intrude upon my hermetically sealed prison!