I balk at watching televised presidential debates, but I have written dream poems about both Richard Nixon and George W. Bush. As far as I can recall, I have never dreamed about a Democratic presidential candidate, though I do vote for them.

In the old days, whenever W's voice came over the air, I had to turn off the radio, no matter what he was saying. The very sound of his syllables gave me the heebie-jeebies.

I can't tell you why staged political debates make my skin crawl, but they do. Even though O's voice is downright euphonious, I can't tolerate the scripts, and those decorated TV backgrounds, and all that artificially flavored reportage. I can't stand the word reportage either.

Poets are never liberals or conservatives, they are always radicals or reactionaries; and today, of course, public life rejects these indecorous extremes. True, the far right has worked up something resembling a movement in recent years, but it remains intellectually disreputable. On the left, in spite of sporadic efforts in New York and California, those of us who are born anarchists have to agree there isn’t much doing. In other words the political attitudes usually endorsed by poets are now amorphous, disintegrated, anachronistic, without programs. Yet this ought to be exactly the political condition in which poets can flourish and in which politically directed poems—and I mean poems in the completest sense—can be written without becoming debased by doctrinaire points of view. I cannot speak for reaction; but it is hard for me to believe that any radical poet in the country today lacks a point on which he can stand firm, a point from which, as the spokesman of us all, he can attack known injustices and stupidities. Isn't the bomb, our monstrous, inescapable, political absurdity, the place to begin? And why then isn't it happening?

Hayden Carruth wrote those sentences in 1963. Does that cheer you or depress you?