[Shaun J. Russell]

You know why people like KG piss me off? It's because when they put their stuff across as "poetry", and get attention for doing so, the general public starts to equate that dreck with poetry in general, thus causing people to think, "Well if that's what poetry is, then clearly I don't like poetry."

There's a ridiculously small amount of people who can actually claim to "like" what KG "writes". But those same people somehow manage to maim the credibility of poetry as an art form.

In visual art, someone like Jackson Pollock could get away with splattering a canvas with paint and calling it "art". It was different, it was new, it was a statement. But fortunately for the state of visual art, the next fifty years wasn't full of other artists throwing paint at canvas -- there were some, to be sure, but it got old fast.

I think the dilution of accessibility is what has harmed poetry the most. Goldsmith's work isn't accessible. A lot of free verse poetry isn't accessible. Perhaps I'm a bigoted purist, but I know that when I read most formal poems, at least I know what's going on -- what the point is. So much poetry these days is at odds with that notion.