mess up the space

A poet who liked to mess up the page with broken sentences and floating words and phrases.

scholarship or sensibility

Distinguishing between a criticism based on scholarship or one relying on sensibility.

figure / ground

Were there not a different aesthetic sensibility by which we could contrast our own, then how would we set our art apart? We can fight the background, but we shouldn’t wish it away. It is the necessary contrast, and we should respect it as such.

deep divide

Controversies about the smallest of poems (e.g. Saroyan’s ‘lighght’) tell one a lot about the deep divide in poetic sensibility.

against your grain

Read against your grain.