Obit 6 (for the obits, as they were)
With these obits, I never meant to trick you into poetry.
If anything, that two-time poet laureate of ours Billy Collins tricked you first when he wrote that book called, “The Trouble With Poetry.”
I know that you know that there’s a lack of poetry in our lives. This is as obvious and honest as unfinished wood is prone to splinter.
Without poetry, Nabokov wouldn’t have painted in pointillism the beautiful nuance of disappointment in humanity. Without poetry, Lydia Davis wouldn’t have captured the horror and disgust of a lingering dog fart. Without poetry, we’re just a sequence of mad, missing moments.
But still, I don’t want to trick you into it. I was just trying to impress you. I didn’t mean the poetry to be pretense.
So join us today in celebrating the death of the poetic obit, where the first-person ordinarily yields to the third-person. Today we celebrate the first-person taking charge, despite its always having been the far less trustworthy narrator.
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