makes room for misfits

Poetry welcomes all misfit texts.

genre error

Nothing is more off-putting than a poet disappointed about how poetry (theirs in particular) is not being widely noticed.

lays claim

Poetry lays claim to all language-made things that fit no other genre.

welcoming all that follow

Being the first genre, poetry embraces all other genres.

jail break

Poet, make a genre jail break.

face it

When it comes to poetry, all genre considerations are off.

unexpected prose

The prose writer was dismayed that a poem could be made of prose.

genre renegade

Often the best poets are those writers who hardly know what poetry is.

my life in realtime

The journal is the narcissist’s preferred genre.

nothing worse

Couplet: Is there anything worse / than a novel in verse?

constant threat

A poem that threatened line by line to turn into a different genre.

polyhedron box

The ‘box’ we call poetry is a polyhedron still building out new spaces.

ur-genre

If a good poet is using prose it's being used toward some purpose or for some effect. Poetry is the ur-genre: It takes and uses whatever resources the language offers. And when the language is lacking resources, poetry may well create a few more elements no one knew were there.

new species

A poem that was unfamiliar as such.

genre renegade

I’ve never accepted that Joyce’s works are classed prose and not poetry.

make and mark

The artist creates, and the audience defines.

recognizes no borders

Poetry is like a bird, it ignores all frontiers.

—Yevgeny Yevtushenko (Quoted July 2, 1967)

genre fluid

The work was ‘transgenre’.

fragment transcendent

The close relationship between the Romantic conception of literature and the fragment was most explicitly articulated in the work of Friedrich Schlegel and other German Romantic writers based in and around the university town of Jena from the end of eighteenth to beginning to nineteenth century. For instance, Friedrich Schlegel declares: ‘There is so much poetry and yet there is nothing more rare than a poem!’ This is due to the vast quantity of poetical sketches, studies, fragments, tendencies, ruins, and raw materials’*.

—Ben Grant, The Aphorism and Other Short Forms (Routledge, 2016)

*Philosophical Fragments by Friedrich Schlegel, translated by Peter Firchow, Minneapolis, London, University of Minnesota Press, 1991.

no such thing

The prosiest of poets are the first to reject the prose poem.