My collaboration with my artist friend Tony Thorne, that culminated in Last Days of the Mill (a finalist in the 2013 Tasmanian Book Prize), left me with profound ethical misgivings on one particular score. In this 2017 paper, I face that demon down. And in the process I make some important claims about the uses to which poetry can be put, beyond poetry. This is a paper that also arrives at contentious territory, then. I wouldn’t mind hearing your reaction to these grand claims.