repulsive and extreme

…I am convinced that for a poet to be great we must find ourselves repelled by some part of this poet’s work. Not just mildly disquieted, but actively repelled. So Marianne Moore is repulsive, extreme, in scrupulosity. (The great critic Randall Jarrell, in trying to describe what about Marianne Moore’s poetry put readers off, listed “her extraordinary discrimination, precision and restraint, the odd propriety of her imagination.” He adored her work, by the way.) There has got to be a fanaticism—it doesn’t matter, it can be the fanaticism of fastidiousness—but there has got to be some private path the reader just can’t follow all the way. There must be a crack in the poet of some sort. It has to be deep, privately potent, and unmendable—and the poet must forever try to mend it.

—Kay Ryan, “Inedible Melon,” Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose (Grove Press, 2020), 142.

poetry third

The secret of being a great poet lies in having an abiding interest in the world and in humankind, and not in one’s attention to poetry.

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.

exit solo

Sad as it is to say, a great poet of love is dying alone. [Berkeley, CA]

solo style

The mark of a great poet is that the work is such that it cannot set off a style. Some may imitate its most superficial aspects, but the work begins and ends with that poet.

small chevalier

Lowering one’s flimsy lance, charging uphill at the literary windmill of the great poet’s reputation. But no one’s inside anyway, and you look small due to scale.

few or many

There are poets who readily have a few poems that speak for them, that make their reputations, and then there are those poets who exist only in oeuvre, only after reading the body of work can one see fully their achievement.

what is poetry anyway?

Tell me, you people out there, what is poetry anyway?
      Can anyone die without even a little?

--Mark Strand, concluding lines from “The Great Poet Returns,” Blizzard of One (Knopf, 1998)