Cutting through

 There's a quality I miss when it isn't there, and that I strive for myself in a poem. I call it by the phrase "cutting through." It's an urgency, maybe a refusal to compromise with bullshit. When I see a random poem in the New Yorker or the New York Review of Books, the two magazines I'm likely to have on hand in print, I notice how rarely this quality appears, so that it must be that most poets and people choosing poems don't care about it. It might be difficult to achieve, but if it isn't there, I have more difficulty caring about the poem. 

It's like when Jesus makes some sassy comeback at some stupid or impertinent question, in the Gospels. Or WCW: "I bought a dish mop / having no daughter, / for they had twisted / fine ribbons of shining copper / about white twine..."  

It is the immediacy of the perception. A poet who notices something, and then tries to come up with a simile after the fact to describe it, is putting things in the wrong order. I hate that kind of junior high school simile, where you put the simile in just because you think poems have to have similes. Maybe that's the only kind of figurative language you know. It just seems lazy to me.