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As “Sex and the City” descends upon us, I’ve been thinking about a comment from Counter Critic , who declared that “Art, by definition, is false.” He included the Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum as an example of art that isn’t quite false enough (am I paraphrasing you correctly, CC?), and went on to elaborate his views in a subsequent post.

Well, the Murakami show didn’t fly for me, either - except for the animation, especially the Kanye West video, and the Louis Vuitton salesroom; interestingly, the moments where the line between art and other (whether you want to call that other “the real world,” “low,” “commerce” or something else) were the most substantial. I think that’s because we want art to do a strange double duty, to simultaneously be outside of or beyond our experience, yet resonate deeply within it.

This is where a popular phenomenon like “Sex and the City” was so powerful - it gave us the illusion that this glittery, romantic version of life in Manhattan, though obviously false (no freelance writer could afford so many shoes …), connected to a truer, deeper idea about the city - that idea may be a myth, but it is no less real for being so. And that’s why, I think, there is such anxiety about the movie: the issue is not whether it will be good or bad, but whether it will upend the delicate balance contained within that illusion. Nowhere do the perils of not being able to go home again exist more fully than in art.

And, just as art has this duality, so does our consumption of it. We need “taste” to function, paradoxically, as both an objective and a subjective concept, as demonstrated by the conflicting ideas held within the phrase “There’s no accounting for taste,” and the notion of good and bad taste. Brian Phillips has an interesting essay on this in the September 2007 issue of “Poetry,” titled “Poetry and the Problem of Taste.” You can read it here .

Poetry, more so perhaps than any other art right now, is suffering from an upset in these crucial balances. Poetry is a highly constructed form, more so than most prose - but we also need it, on some level, to seem utterly, effortlessly “true” (this is where the poet Frank O’Hara was so brilliant). This truth is rarely evident in contemporary poetry - and all the National Poetry Months in the world won’t save the form from itself on that front.

Unlike “Sex and the City” or a coy, flashy artist like Murakami, poetry won’t ever make such a splash in America - that’s as it should be, I think. The real cause for anxiety is not why aren’t more people reading poems these days, but why are so few so-called poets writing them?