close or unfold

A dialectic of poetics: those who seek the perfect close and those who allow the poem to unfold and unfold…

words or worlds

The dialectic of poetics: those poets who think poems are made of words and those poets who believe poems are worlds.

the many vs. the few

Spew words versus few words: the dialectic of contemporary poetry.

new word, new world

Consider this neologism: “dianamic.” Not dynamic; not dialectic…but to fuse the two words into a new one. Think of dianamic when considering the poems of Wallace Stevens, with his ongoing struggle between imagination (the life of the mind) and reality (a being in the physical world). Dianamic is not the division between two elements, two ideologies, two aesthetics; it's the forces and the flux acting between the two.

neither here nor there

Do your poems begin in the world or do they begin in the word?

the seamstress and the butcher

Sometimes the language is in need of a seamstress; other times a butcher is what’s called for.