fuse public and private

Frank O’Hara’s great popularity surely has something to do with his ability to fuse public and private, to capture those moments of everyday life when we respond, overtly or just subliminally, to the “breaking news” of the day.

—Marjorie Perloff, on “Poem (Khrushchev is coming on the right day!),” The Difference is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems (U. of Penn Press, 2022)

you can't make it up

News report headlines often offer whole poems:
Missing Houston man's body found in his car trunk in Dallas.

let me tell you

Gamblers will let slip news of their recent winnings while being stoic and tight-lipped as regards to their long losing streaks, and it’s the same with writers and their acceptances against the larger accumulation of rejection slips.

permanent things

Fashions, forms of machinery, the more complex social, financial, political adjustments, and so forth, are all ephemeral, exceptional; they exist but will never exist again. Poetry must concern itself with (relatively) permanent things. These have poetic value; the ephemeral has only news value.

—Robinson Jeffers, preface to The Selected Poetry of Robinson Jeffers, Random House, 1938,(p. XV)