A reply to a poetry doubter ...

Poetry is alive and well. It is written, relished and read in a thousand tongues around the globe, in a myriad of shapes and sizes. The influence of yesterday's poetry is, thankfully, wilting on the vine, but that is not the end of poetry. It thrives in deserts and beneath the oceans, it bellows in outback stations and leaps in exotic whorehouses, it soars in cathedrals and whispers in alleyways by neonlight, it is read by torchlight under covers, it is written in refuge centres with a pencil and in pindan with a stick ... It is celebrated, it is ignored, it is here now and hardy, regenerating cell by cell (parthenogenesis) on all continents of the world.