I was aghast when my friend said my poetry had no ideas
but I was complicit when I began to wonder:
what is an idea? I had no idea. I had to agree
no ideas are a good thing for poetry
since none can enjoy a poem and a thought at the same time
unless an idea’s idea hides in an excellent rhyme.
If your poem is in prose, an idea transforms
the poem into a lecture. No reference to mist
can save it, or sunsets or houses or storms.
Beat the idea out of it, out of yourself,
make yourself, even if you have to torture yourself,
mute to all ideas, like when Delmore
compares himself to a bear. No longer
can poetry withstand intellectual notification.
It can destroy the poetry of an entire nation.
Take the modern English poetry of India,
oozing learned, British, pretense
of scholarship and prose. Philip Nikolayev,
friend to Indian poetry, heroic on zoom—
the swooning bric-a-brac of Subramanian,
poetry dying in a stuffy, book-filled, room.
Hearing “twelve major Indian poets,” technical
difficulties and all, it struck me—
there are two ideas. You compare
yourself to the world—opposed, or in love.
Or, and this one’s more refined, compare
different elements of yourself,
and finally, the more refined,
combine the two ideas. And so the poets
of the world mythologize away the mind
and live in an ideal metaphor of bliss
where speech, scholarship, and Darjeeling hiss.