SOURCE: “II: Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems,” in Canadian Forum, Vol. LVIII, No. 687, March 1979, pp. 14-7.

In this essay, McCallum seeks an understanding of Enzensberger's anger and cultural criticism in Poems for People Who Don't Read Poems.

Poems For People Who Don't Read Poems is the title given to the English publication of Hans Magnus Enzensberger's poetry. At first glance it appears to be an absurdist enterprise, perhaps the latest arrogance of an avant-garde deliberately courting an audience which does not exist. But nothing could be further from Enzensberger's purpose.

In reality, the impetus behind his poetic practice is a cultural theory which attempts to understand why human consciousness is distorted in advanced industrial societies. In pre-industrial periods when culture was primarily oral the relationship between master and student, priest and parish, dominator and dominated was relatively transparent: people's minds were shaped from without in a...