A Test of Poetry: Charles Bernstein's Artifice of Absorption vs Davy Jones' Liquid Assets

Whatever the drift may have been,

I always say I am a professor of poetry, I profess poetry; think of me as a snake-oil salesman, a confidence man: I don’t want to test your accumulated knowledge; I want to convince you of the value of poetry as a method, as a way of writing, as a form of vision. . . . .

By the time it took us to absorb it,

. . . . .poetry is the ultimate small business, requiring a careful keeping of accounts to stay afloat.

We’d already been taken in.