Poets Are People Too

Jason Guriel catches us up on some recent novels featuring poets as protagonists (he's not a fan of the genre), and makes a plea to any novelist who wants to try it next:

We could probably use more representations of poets who aren’t lovable losers; who have enjoyed some success in areas outside of literature, such as medicine or insurance—poets for whom poetry is not the only obsession, not a means to revolution. We could do with more poets who, like T. S. Eliot, consider poetry a “supreme amusement”; more poets who, in taking poetry less seriously than, say, a visceral realist, just might wind up taking it more seriously. We could do with more poets who will assure us that they, too, dislike poetry. In general, we could stand to read about fewer adolescents, fewer failures, fewer white guys. We could stand to read about more cult figures—not the fetish objects of some avant-garde’s perpetual questing, but craftsmen, poets’ poets, inveterate scribblers in margins, on receipts.