The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

Being a poet in America makes as much sense as a butt full of pennies. That’s one of the pleasures of being a poet in America. There’s something wonderful, something perversely subversive about being disconnected from the world of goods and services and John Maynard Keynes, if only for an hour or two every now and again. It’s freedom. Poetry is an uncharted wilderness along whose margins capitalism wilts like arugula in the Wedge parking lot on the Fourth of July. Inside its borders, the mind blooms and the imagination yields a bumper crop, yet the marketplace rejects poetry.