Please check out my latest pandemic-inspired essay on poetry and capitalism at Jacket Magazine -

EXCERPT:

Poetry is a low-stakes celebratory game in the larger machinery we inhabit, and for that reason, despite a part of our industry’s desire to run in sync with capitalist values, to don the yoke of capitalism, in the fullness of time, poetry is also one of the least likely of the arts to be read and revered for who was published in what prestigious publication.

I do not pick up a Cesar Vallejo poem and decide it isn’t meaningful because it never made it to whatever the hottest venue was in Paris in his last years. Vallejo had escaped government persecution in Peru, was occasionally destitute, often depressed, and died in Paris in poverty.

Continued at Jacket Magazine - http://jacket2.org/commentary/two-essays