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But in the US we now create something like 3 to 6000 professional
diploma’ed “poets” a year who are turning out hundreds of thousand
“poems” day in day out — there are now at rough glance something close
to half a million published poets in the US. Now, I prefer that to be
the case rather than those kids having wandered off & joined the
military or the evangelical troops. At the risk of sounding elitist, I
want to suggest however that most of this work does not have what my
third grandfather of the day, grand-pa Ezra called the “arete,” which
he translated as “virtue”, though for the Greeks the word actually
probably meant something closer to “being the best you can be”, or
“reaching your highest human potential”, & which I like to
mistranslate further as “arête,” as in a French fish, though not as a
French stop sign, or, better even, as the arresting quality of something
with spine.
