Anna Moschovakis at Kicking Wind

The world can use all the help it can get, and any activity--poetry writing and reading and translating and publishing included--can either ratify or resist the world's worst tendencies. Ortega y Gasset made this great distinction, in an essay on the feasibility of translation, between good utopians and bad utopians. Good utopians genuinely believe in the impossibility of the task at hand, but they attempt it anyway because it (the attempt, as well as the task) is intrinsically valuable. Bad utopians are optimists in disguise; they secretly think that because the impossible goal is worth pursuing, it must ultimately be attainable; it's the idea of attainability that is actually motivating them. It seems to me that a net-positive change in the world, from poetry or from anything, is unlikely, and its desirability doesn't make it any more possible. But we have to do something while we are on this earth--we can't just sit on it and wait for it to shatter. And the means are all we have, since we'll never know the end. So on my better days I try to be a Good Utopian: Poetry (and I) can't change the world. Poetry (and I) should try.