Mission: to be adequate to destructive reality

“A. Alvarez, responding to the almost dementedly black poetry of Ted Hughes’s Crow in 1970, wrote this: ‘Hughes now joins the select band of survivor-poets whose work is adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit.’    … a kind of manifesto.

 

“To be adequate to the destructive reality we inhabit — not superior, not necessarily therapeutic, but adequate. Capable. Durable. There.” James Parker, Bookends, Sept. 16, 2014. New York Times Sunday Book Review. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/21/books/review/when-discussing-books-what-does-taste-have-to-do-with-it.html [I can’t find a credit for the photo, but it’s posted in several blogs and in an article in the Galway (Ireland) Advertiser.]