I still have a beef with the short shrift the New York Times gives to poetry in its book reviews. No, poetry may not be a bestseller nor what the average newspaper is looking to read about, but doesn’t our media have obligation to expand our horizons and our minds?

Today, the Times still failed to write a review of book by contemporary, living poet. But the Sunday book review, in its semi-obligatory, monthly write up of “something kind of to do with poetry,” managed to include a literate, wide ranging (within the Western poetic tradition), and dare I say impassioned argument for the necessity  and purpose.

“The Poetry of Catastrophe,” as the piece is called, identifies poetry as the tool best equipped to speak about great tragedies.

This is not a new argument by any means. It is a repetition of the thesis that poetry is the literary form best equipped to (or even the one solely able to) describe the ineffable.

Being a piece in a New York paper, September 11 was mentioned.

The poets who were name dropped and quoted included John Milton, Walt Whitman, T.S. Eliot, William Shakespeare, W. H. Auden, William Butler Yeats, and Adam Zagajewski.

One at least hopes that some readers will be inspired to (re)examine some of these poets and find some meaning in them and also find some meaning in the mere act of reading poetry.