face forward

A poet who wore the language mask.

single line

What prose masks with explanation, poetry exposes in the stroke of a line.

masked man

Frost uses masks not to deflect the personal voice but to find one, or several. He speaks truthfully when speaking as someone else, when he can assume the otherness of a mask, looking through those eyeholes at the world. Tone, he notes, is how you take yourself, your stance toward the world; literally, it is your attitude. Paradoxically, it seems harder to speak as one’s self without the sustained practice of speaking as somebody else.

—Jay Parini, “The Personal Voice,” Why Poetry Matters (Yale Univ. Press, 2008)

no mask

One cannot read a poem while wearing a mask. Poems are for the open-faced and wide-eyed.