Maybe It’s in the Response

Are we not, to paraphrase

The poet Elizabeth

Alexander, of too much

Interest to each other?

(The paraphrase was adding

The phrase too much, to the quote.)

And anyway, poetry’s

Not the genre that displays

The most interest in others—

Supernatural beings,

Deities, that sort of thing,

Engaged archaic poets,

And metaphysics, landscapes,

Passionate declarations,

And lunar allegories

Had turns, but an interest

In each other per se tends

To emerge as something prose.

But it’s a wonderful line

At the end of a good rant

About what poetry is,

As she imagines herself

Shouting her definitions

Of poetry at students.

To be able to engage

Each other on such a thin

Subject, surely that suggests

Yes, indeed, we are too much

Of interest to each other,

And in how we will respond.