conditions favorable to life

Like a habitable planet a good poem should have an atmosphere and weather.

dizzying universe

You have to read haphazardly, open and discover good books by happenstance these days. There are so many poets, so many books (planets), swimming into one’s ken (to steal a phrase from Keats).

multiple moons

Certainly a planet with two or three moons would have better poets living on it than our own.

satellite attention

Forever my mind will orbit this poem, ever unable to penetrate its atmosphere.

come from afar

To be a poet from another planet.

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.

what mattered

It was not important that [the poems] survive.
What mattered was that they should bear
Some lineament or character,

Some affluence, if only half-perceived,
In the poverty of their words,
Of the planet of which they were part.


—Wallace Stevens, from “The Planet On The Table”