Hard to write?

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/69120/why-is-the-great-american-poem-so-hard-to-write

Extract

Poets are persons aware of aloneness and competent to speak in the space of solitude—who, by speaking alone, make possible for themselves and others the being of persons, in which all the value of the human world is found.

This belief in “the being of persons” is so unfashionable it’s almost refreshing. But if Graham’s speaker is too incoherent, Grossman’s is all too coherent, the voice of someone who—having long ago decided that he’s a poet—apparently feels no need to revise awful proclamations like this one, from “The Famished Dead”:

Now look! That other shadow is Pat, my
old nurse.
She had no body even then. She wore what
nurses wore instead of bodies in those days.
That’s why her being dead now makes no difference
to me. What’s important is still her body.
“Take it off, Pat.
Instead of breasts to suck, you wore two pins.
Instead of a cunt, God knows what you had there.”

There are humanists, and then there are hams. Grossman, here, isn’t after the choppily well-separated thing, the self-contained poem. Rather, he’s a good example of those contemporary poets who, to borrow Paglia’s words, “treat their poems like meandering diary entries and craft them for effect in live readings rather than on the page.” Certainly, Grossman’s use of exclamation points, italics, and lurid words makes his work ready made for the podium.

Of course, whether Grossman actually reads Descartes’ Loneliness at live readings is beside the point; throughout the book, the speaker, frequently referred to as “Allen,” booms his voice outward as if the reader’s skull was an auditorium. He begins one piece with the proclamation, “O Kid!” Another one starts with “Look!” Here’s a megaphone of a stanza, from “The Invention of Night”:

Song is extreme work. Help me, river sister!
It’s getting dark. Hey, sweet water! Flow fresh
through ocean’s salt. Give me some words for him
I love, so he can give words to someone else.
Start love’s gift once more:—WORDS FOR
ANOTHER.
So everybody will have something to give someone.
If not, I’ll drown you in oceans of salt tears.
Then you’ll be indistinguishable from tears.
This is Arcadia.