At first glance, Fritos may be difficult to deconstruct so as to reveal any would-be barbarity associated with them.

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They have only 3 ingredients: corn, corn oil, and salt, and do not pose much of any health risk due to their relatively low fat and sodium content.

They seem like a simple, almost perfectly benign snack.   If any snack might be considered 'civilized', again, at first glance, it ought to be the Frito.

What could be wrong with them?  Is there any way the Frito might be considered uncivilized?  But, yes, indeed, there certainly is.

If you consider the ethical implications of tax-payer-funded subsidies on corn production, and the effects of this on the environment and humanity, one inevitably arrives at the conclusion that Fritos are potentially a perfect example of the greed-driven, systemic moral bankruptcy inherent to our fundamental precepts of civilization itself.

I'll let you brood on this, Yell.

I don't see what the fuzz is about. Mankind is what mankind is.

So what is civilization ? My idea of civilization ever from the very beginning is that a group of people can live together and in their geographical area they can agree on a set of rules to conduct by. As long as the rules are followed, people are acting in a civil manner.

We have been doing this whole civilization thing for millennia and apparently its working out, we're not extinct yet.

You think civilization is not very civil? Well it is. The direct opposing alternative to a civilization would be a full anarchy, where every man does what he wants regardless of what others feel about it.

We do not have that. Anywhere.

Grab a cup of tea, a bisquit and possibly some anti-depressants. Civilization is civil. That's the end of it.

Poetry is not a part of civilization.  It is separate - completely distinct and disassociated from civilization - else it wouldn't be poetry.

"who does poetry by hollering in a jungle"

I'd say Emily Dickenson, for one.  The, probably Shakespeare for another.  Plato, too.  Actually, come to think of it, all poets, in one sense or another, have been doing just that, 'hollering from the [figurative] jungle,' or might we say wilderness, or nature; hollering AT civilization, and sometimes shaking their fists at it, or sometimes worshiping it, or sometimes cursing it, etc...

and I say fooey

Poetry is perhaps the best example of a civilized art since it is a spoken performance that is written down according to conventions that enable any other literate and educated person to recreated the original spoken performance of the poet even five hundred years after their death.

to someone not trained to its conventions in a school it is jibberjabber scratches on a piece of paper

Xeno, your examples hardly encompass poetry.

in fact most people would say that your examples aren't poetry at all.