emerging poet

No longer an emerging poet, I imagine myself a cicada, buried in the ground at a shallow depth, wrapped in a paper casing of my poems, waiting to emerge from the earth seventeen years hence. For no reason. Making sounds no one wants the hear.

larger interests

As just sounds and marks I wouldn’t care a whit for words.

voice over vanity

For me, poetry is the voice that supersedes vanity. To concentrate exclusively on “American poetry” can ignore the vast expanse of immigrant sounds bearing punctuated rhythms or haunting, free-floating tunes. Music introduces the meaning, and carries languages both harsh and melodious, its premonitions understood only in retrospect.

—Laura Manuelidis, "The XYZ of Hearing: The Squid’s Ink,” Poetry (July/August, 2013)

self-enclosed, self-limiting

A poem presents material so that it becomes a universe in itself…There is something self-enclosed and self-limiting in a poem, and this self-sufficiency is the reason, as well as the harmony and rhythm of sounds, why poetry is, next to music, the most hypnotic of the arts.

—John Dewey, "The Varied Substance Of The Arts," Art As Experience(Perigee/Penguin Putnam Books, 1980)