Susan Sontag Has Worms

The apple and the worm are more than the apple itself.

     "We have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice."
          -Susan Sontag

     I love this quote very much, and even the fact that Sontag goes on to say that "music, film, dance, architecture, painting, and sculpture" are all worth more critical attention than literary forms. This was true in the 1960s when Sontag wrote it, and possibly even more so today. So it is, so.
     The question then, I guess, is whether poetry is being overthrown or throwing over. Is it a rowing thing, over now, a woven ring or owing then? Is it a throwing up or a winged river?
     Personally, I'm grateful it's fallen away from popular culture, and relegated to a kind of parasitical state, freed from obligations to entertain and even to be 'understood.' The parasite has the host and it has itself.
     Poets have a long, rich tradition of slithering around in the dark. Darkness, after all, is full of possibilities, lightness of limitations.