So as a poet - I question thee.

I understand your point. I grok your point. And I think maybe I understand it.

I once coined a phrase that I'm proud of when people kept calling me an artist and I kept insisting that I was just a photographer, and photography is a skill, not an art. To make them happy and make me happy, I honed this phrase:

Photography is the craft of turning perspective into art.

That makes me a craftsman, not an artist. I'm much more comfortable being a craftsman. After all, what I photographed was already there. I'm just showing you. Yeah, I'm showing you the way I see it, but in the end it's just pointing a box with a hole in it covered in glass at something.

The "art", if you will, is in the perspective. I don't know that there's anything less tangible than "perspective." Photography, then, is perspective made real.

I crafted another phrase I'm proud of that I'm sure belongs to a million philosophers whose names I recognize: You can have focus or perspective, but not both.

As you can tell, I'm a visual thinker. As a visual thinker, I think I see your objection. I share it.

You can't have perspective about a current event. Someone who spends months on a poem is, subconsciously or not, evaluating it in the stream of time. Someone who spends months on a poem is regarding it from all sides, in all light, at sunrise and sunset, to truly present the perspective of the idea. It is that perspective - how you describe the idea - that is the art. And it is very difficult to give that level of meditative regard to a current event by definition. It is being shaped wholesale as we observe.

If poetry is how we adapt to trauma, though, we can't exactly wait. There's something valuable about the raw and unregarded as well. It may not jive with your aesthetic, though.

Piketty had an interesting observation in Capital in the 21st Century. He pointed out that prior to the 20th century, novelists listed monetary amounts in their works. They were safe in doing this because the value of things really didn't change. Something worth 40 florins in 1680 was worth 40 florins in 1880 (or whatever). So all the numbers in Jane Austen were there to give the audience a real sense of wealth, now and forever. But starting in the 1900s, all that shit went out the window because capital controls went haywire. now, whenever you see a price on something it's just ridiculous (I'm reading The Da Vinci Code: 20 million Euros! BWUAHHAHAHA!!!!).

"In the loop" was an interesting poem in which the phrase "virginia Tech" lands like a thud. it's an anachronism spoiling an otherwise interesting composition - in putting in the anchor for street cred, it invalidates the poem for all other expression. It freezes the perspective forever in time.

Humor me. Find a poem about Eugene Hasenfus (who?). If somebody used his name in a poem we'd laugh... but the sentiment wrapped up in that name describes the point where the United States went from "Morning in America" to "Iran Contra Scandal" and it's far too poignant a shift to abuse with pointless proper nouns.

By the way?

Does a dark poet somewhere prepare poems predicting the next serial killer?

Alliteratively beautiful.