Thursday, May 14, 2009

From Tao Lin's article on the Poetry Foundation:

I honestly feel that people who like other kinds of poetry, or other kinds of anything, are as “legitimate” in their appreciation as I am in mine, and that arguing that one thing is “better” than another (without specifying contexts and goals “while aware that all contexts and goals are based on arbitrary assumptions”) is like arguing with a four-year-old that their favorite color should be “red” instead of “blue.” If I did that “with complete seriousness” I would view myself as “insane.” The four-year-old would probably feel severely confused and hate itself, since to get it to like “blue” instead of “red” I would probably say more intense versions of things like “blue is ruining colors,” “blue is what is wrong with the world today,” “blue is not important compared to red,” and “blue is what inferior people like.”

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