"...for a while the small illuminated stage of 'culture', where
ideas & words could loom large & seem like causes, passed
for the whole scene. Now that's dissolving--to writers it
appears catastrophic--to demagogues perhaps a Godsend--but
nothing in the way humanity creates or resists innovations is
different or will be different. Except for the fact that trivial
twitches on the sleeping face of the Electorate get amplified
into earthquakes by our power to instantaneously respond to
bad dreams. Maybe the best way to focus local power is to
work on attenuating those larger influences. ...it makes me wonder
whether the visceral-reponse democracy we are heading into
will keep pulling energy out of the commonwealth or reach some
point of general distress that historically has always resulted in
great upheavals in the way people live, if not the way they
think. ...even the Reaganoids in Washington & elsewhere cannot
find a world sufficiently sanitized & isolated to maintain their
lifestyle once the roads become impassible--there aren't enough
helicopters. Poetry has turned itself into helicopters for the
minds of another elite...and meanwhile reinvents itself as Rap in
the ghettos. It's not yet as distinct as Latin and the vernaculars
were to become; that means choices made now can influence their
reciprocal evolution. Shall i say "politics" is another such heli-
copter? --that it means one thing to people who own houses and
something else to renters...?

"Our fathers to their graves have gone;
Their strife is past, their triumph won;
But sterner trials wait the race
Which rises in their honored place;
A moral warfare with the crime
And folly of an evil time." --Whittier

The most famous concrete poem.