monocular vision

Imagine a person wearing a monocle: the image of a bad critic with a single critical lens engaged with a work.

inert images

Images that don’t rise to the status of insight.

he can overdo you

When you think you’re overdoing it, read some Swinburne and accept your excess.

dead or alive

The articles that claim poetry is dead or in decline are counterbalanced by those touting that it’s thriving in our culture or reminding us how important poetry is to our lives.

unpoetic words

One of those words you feel sorry for knowing they’ll never find a way into a poem. Then sometimes you are surprised when such a word shows up in a poem.

[See “tergiversations” from June Jordan’s “Poem for Haruko”]

value-add

The advent of AI will only add cachet to human-made works

poetry's way

“though the material of poetry is verbal, its import is not the literal assertion made in the words, but the way the assertion is made, and this involves the sound, the tempo, the aura of associations of the words, the long or short sequences of ideas, the wealth or poverty of transient imagery that contains them, the sudden arrest of fantasy by pure fact, or of familiar fact by sudden fantasy, the suspense of literal meaning by a sustained ambiguity resolved in a long-awaited key-word, and the unifying, all-embracing artifice of rhythm.”

—Susanne Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art (1942)

splinter group

Poets are one of society’s splinter groups.