I feel like everyone's about as precious about poetry as they are about their highschool sweetheart, and that's whether they lay claim to it as a high-brow occupation of the oh-so-refined, as a supercharged, ultracool assault on society's failings, or as the humble framing of the everyday, as satisfying and disposable as lunch from a street vendor. Everyone seems very invested in a version of what poetry is/should be, which is most hilarious because (almost) no one is doing anything with the actual stuff, except for in those pursuits wherein we are forced to brush up against it, either in class, in song-lyrics, or in those various media which have divided poetry's many powers among them -- lyrical prose, the vaunted rhetoric of speechwriters, advertisements, homilies, etc).

This all means to me that "Poetry," as entity, shares a fate with all of the other subjects from the past that we argue about, not because they're happening now, but because they give us a sense of who we are, and why we mean something. We'll keep arguing over everything dead and gone that offers some force to be applied to the present discussion. The war over the present is waged in how we define the past.

Meanwhile, I think the only useful definition of poetry is flat-out descriptive and broadly inclusive. No one likes everything that is technically, by definition, poetry. And that's fine, or whatever. It's a fact anyhow. Taste is fine, inevitable, glorious even, but we should at least try to keep it out of our taxonomy ... at least, that is, if we don't want to constantly be the cause of our own vexation.