makes itself new

Unless the world stands still, poetry will change.

new poetics

Every poem has the right to ask for a new poetics.

—Anna Swir, Talking to My Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1996) translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Leonard Nathan

vision shifted

“White writing” appeared in my art the way flowers explode over the earth at a given time. With this method I found I could paint the frenetic rhythms of the modern city, something I couldn’t even approach with Renaissance techniques. In other words, through calligraphic line I was able to catch the restless pulse of our cities today. I began working this way in England—in Devonshire in 1935—when I returned from the Orient, where I’d studied Chinese brushwork. So in gentle Devonshire during the night, when I could hear the horses breathing in the field, I painted Broadway and Welcome Hero. In the process I probably experienced the most revolutionary sensations I have ever had in art, because while one part of me was creating these two works, another part was trying to hold me back. The old and the new were in battle. It may be difficult for one who doesn’t paint to visualize the ordeal an artist goes through when his angle of vision is being shifted.

—Mark Tobey, The Artist’s Voice: Talks with Seventeen Modern Artists (Da Capo Press, 2000), interviews by Katherine Kuh.

wood splitter

A poem that could drive a wedge into the side of the thickest anthology.

cliché critique

When criticizing common expressions or themes, too many critics/reviewers are quick to cue that commonplace dictum of Pound’s: “Make it new.” Shouldn’t the critic/reviewer abide by the same standard and make his/her case without resorting to a cliché quote?

make it now

Avant-gardists frequently mistake the word ‘new’ for a value descriptor when it is merely a temporal marker.

new improved tide

Some people say Ezra Pound first said “Make it new.” I’m pretty sure that Proctor & Gamble had that slogan long before he did. There is the ring of ersatz capitalism in that ‘make it new’ dictum.

first stumbling efforts

So the enthusiastic praise often lavished on works employing innovatory techniques, new stylistic tricks, novelties of form or medium is misplaced unless these bring, or have the potential to bring, some new aesthetic character of value. In this respect those who inveigh against the cult of the original are right; but equally, those are wrong who decry any extreme stylistic or technical innovation before assessing what is being done with it or what might be, what new worlds of aesthetic experience are opened up. Who could have foreseen the glories to be achieved, faced with the first stumbling efforts in sonnet form or the first essays in pictorial perspective?

—Frank Sibley, “Originality and Value”