It’s like that thing they’ve noticed with the crabs;

how hermit crabs have modernized; each grabs

abandoned battery packs or bottles or

whatever junk is littering the shore,

and lives inside it, shorter lives, though lighter,

the contours stranger, and the colours brighter;

It’s similar with poets, is what I mean,

the essay poem’s lability and sheen;

Weird when we’re losing universities

to choose to live inside them, their debris,

make literature that wants to pitch its tents

on solid academic arguments,

that use the poem to describe a truth

that’s worth being imparted to the youth,

though funding cuts mean that it’s not the case;

the poem dreams of HE’s heroic phase,

or carries broken shards of it around,

the language of critique, the still profound

music of the humanities,

to tell you how it feels and how it is

(states of affairs that sometimes seem torn halves,

hence the white space between the paragraphs

that do not follow logically on

but try to transpose logic into song).

Last month I read a well-made argument

that recent hybrid forms were decadent,

that they fell short of mediation,

in ways that had to do with circulation

taking production’s place, that these

were symptomatic in their being released

from the constraints of form and also from

the rigour of the academic norm,

and turned critique and theory into slurry.

It isn’t an unreasonable worry,

because such critics rightly see, I think

that poetry is not the way you link

the subject to society. But then,

A poem is for something else again.

I had a vague experience of hope

for our period-style when reading Pope,

a glimmering of utopia in those

couplets drawing to their graceful close,

because they claimed to lean on nature for

their truth, and take their form from nature’s law,

but actually they knew that they were not

measuring a world or embodying a thought.

Maybe the poems of the present, too

are essays, not to try to say what’s true

in language everyone can understand,

if they have one or two degrees in hand,

but are attempts to work with what we take

to be the form truth takes until it breaks.

Pope knew that what was at his poems’ heart

was not fake nature, it was real art,

the sentiments were all a plastic shell.

The crab had gathered anything that fell

in reach, to shelter what would decompose,

the thing that also lives and moves and grows.

And if a poet seems to think they need

to give you some diet theory while you read,

it’s much the same, I think, or ought to be,

there’s endless things in which to hear the sea.