Where It All Goes Down
Six Feet Under
The setting of this poem is dark, gang, as dark as the bottom of a grave. That's because our man Petit, in addition to being a poet, is also dead. So, if you really and truly wanted to travel to this poem's setting, you'd need to book a ticket to the afterlife.
Of course, we don't recommend that course of action. Those tickets tend to be one-way only, after all. All the same, Petit's time in the land of the dead has lent him some valuable insights—namely: he wasted his life. Sure, we might all say that from time to time (usually after playing Xbox until 3 in the morning on a school night, or after watching a Transformers movie), but there's nothing like being dead to give you a true measure of your own life's accomplishments.
Ironically, the darkness of the grave allows Petit to see the light: his take on poetry was all wrong. He zigged when he should have been zagging, going for the tired clichés and precious forms and forgetting to focus on the most important setting: real life. His lesson, finally, is for each of us to pay more attention to our own immediate settings. There's all kinds of human drama playing out around us, if we just know how to look.