required study

To really know poetry requires an education akin to training in the sciences.

tepid praise

I’m mildly interested in that kind of poetry, but not wildly.

dark passage

You knew going in, this was a poem you’d be lucky to elucidate.

no explanation for it

If you want to annoy a poet, explain his poetry.

—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, The Bed of Procrustes: Practical and Philosophical Aphorisms (Random House, 2016)

vigilant elite

Always the literati must call out the lappers-up of the light popular.

not so bad really

She wrote not a review but an excuse for the poetry.

of no matter

The poetry was not up to a level where critical attention would be worthwhile.

[Thinking of Instagram and Twitter poets.]

inexhaustible

One thought of the poem as a mineshaft, where many have descended into its dim-lit reaches to do their work, each bringing to the surface a few tons of material, and yet the veins radiate in many directions, and go on for indeterminate distances.

unread and not ready

Too much speaking about poetry without due study.

noir poetics

First case the joint with a good close reading.

critic v. artist

An art learned only from books or earned by the trials of making.

page turned

An anthology of poems that had fallen out of the anthologies.

wear and tear reader

He didn’t just read poems he wore them out.

hive poem

Opening the anthology, I realized the canonical poem was almost humming, as though it was now just a hive of critical voices.

not embarrassed

Millay has been overlooked by the critics of our time until very recently. Two new biographies have ushered in an era in which, I trust, Millay will be brought back into the light she deserves. In all my undergraduate and graduate courses in the seventies and eighties, she was never mentioned, but The Collected Poems, a hardback, given to me by my father one Christmas when I was in college, has been on the shelf by every desk at which I have ever written a word. When I read “Renascence”—her juvenilia, really—I am not embarrassed, either for her or for me. She was learning how to write and I was learning how to read. We started thinking big. We knew, or thought we knew, that for a women’s writing to be taken seriously, we should aim for the “universal,” and what is more universal than all the human cries that ever cried? It is not a sin to overwrite. That is another thing she taught me: not to be embarrassed by large feeling, and not to be embarrassed to let your reader know of that large feeling.

—Robin Behn, “In the Music Room,” Planet on the Table: Poets on the Reading Life (Sarabande Books, 2003), edited by Sharon Bryan and William Olsen.

second trial

Interestingly enough, the best words ever spoken of Howl were said at its obscenity trial in the moment of its emergence. During the second Eisenhower administration things were culturally very tight, and artists and critics, recovering from the McCarthy era, rushed to the defense of a poem attacked by the Establishment. Rarely has an unknown poem by an obscure poet known such high praise before it has been assessed by the scholarly community. But as soon as the trial was over and the battle won, a reverse set in. The poem began its work of effecting a critical reevaluation of the course of poetry, and the defensive reaction was intense. For a few years you could hardly find anyone who would say a good word for it, but gradually its liberating role was effected, and it has emerged as the guerdon of its generation.

—William Everson, Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (Oyez, 1976)

too close

She began to think of him not as a critic but as a literary stalker.

seemed close enough to touch

The critics were small cold and stony satellites perpetually orbiting that great green and blue planet that was the poet.

instead of reviews

I’m sorry your book was not reviewed, but those were some nice blurbs you got.

inside / outside

What part of a poem's value inheres to the work itself, and how much has accrued by virtue of years of critical attention?