“I didn’t give up writing poetry, I like to say; poetry gave up on me. Through 20-odd years of reading and writing poems, I felt reputations rise and fall around me, certain styles of poems fall in and out of fashion. Unlike with painting or music, the poetry world’s changes occur entirely outside anything that resembles the forces of reception or reading. In New York, it is a self-licking ice cream cone that depends on untalented poets to keep the system going. The more paranoid poets regarded their skills as a threat to those toward the bottom of the Ponzi scheme, whose worship of higher-ups were not adequate enough to rise a level on the Poetry Chain of Being.”

– Goodbye to All Them by Daniel Nester – The Morning News (via @jaybushman)