Even without Alexander's painful reliance on clichéd phrases like "deeply felt," this is all familiar, of course. The romantics, a la Shelley's "Defence of Poetry," ("A poet participates in the eternal, the infinite, and the one; as far as relates to his conceptions, time and place and number are not") insisted on poetry as the spontaneous lyrical expression of inner truth in contrast to folks like Pope and Swift and John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, who were more interested in satire or politics or sheer filthiness. The romantics won, the satire and filthiness lost, and now, generations later, "poetry" presumes to deliver the same lyrical emotion and the same inner truth, although the spontaneity looks a little threadbare.

"There have been moments in our shared human history in particular parts of the world where poets and also singers have been banned," Alexander says.

But why? What is there to fear? Precisely this: the force of the quicksilver self that poetry sets free—desire that can never be bound by laws and legislations. This is the force of the human, the spirit level of our lives.

Poetry is always already revolutionary, then. What it says hardly matters. Poetry is useful because of its useless essence, not because of its individual meaning.

Of course, this is nonsense. When poets or writers have been persecuted, it's generally not because of some abstract contradiction between tyranny and poetry. It's because the persecuted poets said specific things the tyrants didn't want to hear. Anna Akhmatova faced persecution not because she was a poet, but because her poetry was explicitly anti-Stalinist. In contrast, Pound and Mussolini got along swimmingly. Vitor Jara was murdered because he took a stand with Allende, but the British Empire didn't have a problem with Kipling.

The point here is that poetry, as poetry, is, in fact, useless. Because poetry, as poetry, is nothing. There is no essential "poetry" that has a meaning and a use absent context, any more than there is an essential "music" that can, or should, lend profundity to the sounds of Miles Davis, Miley Cyrus, and Gonzo eating a rubber tire to "The Flight of the Bumblebee." Keats and Shelley, perhaps, were interested in exploring an inward-turning lyrical alternative to history. But Dr. Seuss was mostly trying to make folks laugh. Langston Hughes wrote to entertain and to teach; he certainly would never have made a sharp break between history and poetry, since so much of his poetry was focused on how history, and particularly America's racial history, is intertwined with the self. And then there's Nicki Minaj with the immortal lines, "All these bitches is my sons. . . . If I had a dick I would pull it out and piss on 'em." Poetry doesn't have to save the world. It can just be a (literal) pissing contest.