Contemporary poetry: "Thumbs down!"
by T.S. Minton

"I no longer feel compelled, or even impelled, to write poetry these days, and possibly will not for years to come. Number one, that muse has closed down. When I do get the urge to go on a creative jag, in the midst of the skull-splitting caffeinated stress and frantic pursuit of business endeavors which presently dominates my daily life, I plan on going back ot my original love: visual art, especially cartooning. Number two, although I have no interest in actively following it, what I have heard of contemporary poetry bores me silly. I find most of it insular, cryptic, pseudo-intellectual, full of annoying cadences and overly wedded to the dogmatic concept that art should be a platform for anarcho-leftist political screeds (to wit: Lawrence Ferlinghetti's wrong-headed little manifesto "Poetry as Insurgent Art"). I'll pass. Anyway, the greatest poet of our time, in an opinion I share with my former B.U. professor Christopher Ricks, is a rock and roller, not a self-conscious academic: Bob Dylan. Dylan, almost always, has dealt in riddles, rhymes, and metaphorical symbol-systems - NOT polemics. His concerns are the universal truths of the human heart - NOT promoting the passing ideologies of the day."
- From Squidoo.com/tsminton