I had a horror of much of the distinctly unpleasant "political" writing that I read in classrooms. These poems were taught from the perspective that writing that displayed a self-consciousness of language as an ideological apparatus, or that argued for certain kinds of cultural representation, was inherently worth reading. I am sympathetic to that stance. However, I often did not enjoy reading that work. Perhaps the claim for such writing was never beauty anyway. It was important even if it was not beautiful. But it is a challenge for a work of art to be effectively important if it is not pleasing, for the pleasing-but-unimportant is simply, well, more pleasing. I was about to write that I'd rather read the important stuff, even if it was unpleasant, but that's exactly it: I'm human; I wouldn't.

-- Sonnet L'Abbé, "On Beauty: Sonnet L'Abbé," Lemon Hound