Confessions of a Human Nerve Ending

If you believe that poetry is about the celebration of language then poetry whether written or spoken exists in a multitude of forms.    Contrary to many people's view, I believe poetry is a very welcoming, wants to embrace the variety of work being produced in its name, but too often I'm meeting minds that want to be prescriptive rather than descriptive with the term.   To be prescriptive with "poetry" is to say, "I like poetry, but what "they" are doing is merely rant, or yelling, or just prose with a lot of bombast," or "not poetry."   To be descriptive is to say, "I don't have a definition.   If someone wants to call what they do poetry, that's fine by me."   To be descriptive is to strip institutions of their power, their cultural capital, to decide how, what, and why artists create.   Too often, our institutions (cultural and educational) celebrate the models that conform to their prescribed notions and mock art th...