Ali Alizadeh makes the case that bringing poetry into the mainstream is incompatible with excellence in the art form, that it would turn poetry into a degraded commodity, that the mainstream is a wholly horrid and irredeemable thing. On these points I disagree.

Looking out the window of a tram, I saw a girl sitting on the front steps of a block of grey-brick units. She looked about thirteen and was crying with abandon. Her face was red and she had what might have been blue ink smudged across her arms and cheeks.