diva poet

I love much of Rilke, but he was a ‘diva’ in the negative sense of the word.

turn back

Nowhere in Larkin’s poems are the adverse and the negated more apparent than in his exit strategies—those terminating gestures at the end of his poems that regularly turn their backs on the reader, offer a blank stare or open a window onto nothingness. ‘Un-,’ ‘not,’ ‘non,’ ‘no,’ ‘never,’ ‘nothing,’ ‘nowhere’ and other isotopes of the same linguistic element are present in his last lines, time and time again. ‘Nothing, like something, happens anywhere’, from ‘I Remember, I Remember’, could have been the poster child for this lecture, but there are dozens more such endings, and this from a relatively modest output…

—Simon Armitage, A Vertical Art: Oxford Lectures (Faber, 2021)

first concern

Whether the assessment is positive or negative, the critic’s first task is to make the reader care.

60 second manifesto

I thought this was a well executed performance piece (60 second lecture). I've often observed that much of the 'prosody' of language poetry is expressed in the negative: Poetry that is asyntactic, non-narrative, non-linear or discontinuous, lacking closure, etc. True to form, Bernstein's poem-manifesto is completely phrased in the negative except for the last line, in which he invokes the great Borscht Belt comics' mantra of 'a joke is all in the timing'.