The philosophist Theodor Adorno famously stated, in 1949, that writing a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric. He proceded: “And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today”. With some simplification poetry may be understood as an art of beauty, and indeed that is how poetry has been perceived in most times and most places. Anyone not in poetry’s “in-crowd” is sure to start thinking of flowers, waterfalls, nationalism, high-end emotion and heartbreak when presented with the word “poetry”. Poetry, in this sense, is a bit like water-colouring, somehow – standing between being purely decoratory and an expression of something private, almost lavatorial in the sense that even though your poetry springs from a natural (in some sense beautiful) need, maybe you should refrain from doing it in public. Properly... »
